Collateral Damage

[Malia Afredane]

She was on the bridge when she got the call. The man looked tired and uncomfortable and requested privacy for her so she had taken the call to the meeting room. Something cold gripping her throat as he identified himself as a Balmorran Security officer. It wasn't anyone she knew, just some government official, doing his job and notifying relatives after the rubble had been sifted through.

Azalea Afredane was among those who had been killed in the fighting near an arms factory when the Republic had invaded Balmorra. She took the news stoically, thanking him for the call before everything drifted away from her consciousness. It became a haze of grief and doubt and tears. She had collapsed in the hallway, a wail resounding from her as she shook with the weight of her mother's death.

Rusty was on Dressel, the Quin crew were back on their ship, Sid was chasing Corr.

She was alone.

The Grey Warden was on a three week haul up the Rimma Trade Route. They had stops to make and so her first call was to Rusty. He had dropped everything to come take the helm on the Warden while she went home to make the arrangements and see to her mother's estate. The coms didn't stop ringing after that. Government officials, insurance adjusters, lawyers. There was a lot to be dealt with.

Then Lars called. He started to speak, clearly affected but Mal just glared at him, shook her head and ended the transmission. Lars had Izzy for a year or two. Mal had her for 37. Kark him and his grief.

She hugged Rusty hard when he got there, drunk as hell, her face puffy from the crying. She had insisted he stay with her and for a long time, she just laid there, curled in a ball and wishing the world didn't feel so damn cold to her. Rusty just kept his hand on her shoulder, sitting on the edge of her bed, a rock when all the galaxy seemed to be coming apart.

She took Gracie and headed off, just as soon as she could convince him that she was sober and collected enough to make the trek. It had been 2 days and she looked numb. There were deep circles under her eyes and Rusty had threatened to put an IV port in her arm to stem the dehydration she was experiencing from too much crying and drinking.

Bin Prime was a nightmare. The cleanup was well underway and the rubble was being removed, but the damage was clear. Mal had pressed for details when she got there, so many people dead. A few of the old timers had convinced Izzy to come with them to a shelter and get away from the fighting. It had been hit by overspray, as the building sat next to a weapons warehouse for one of the factories in town.

The bar had not fared much better. There was extensive damage to the building but it was superficial. There was no power going to the place but the engineers had cleared it as still structurally sound. It was the only place Mal felt comfortable. She had dealt with the funeral, opting for cremation and a small memorial service. She dealt with the insurance companies and the lawyers, and it all blended together in a endless push of days mashed up as she jumped through the necessary hoops to the finality of her mother's passing. She had been booking runs for the Warden as well, keeping her ship flying, despite not being on it.

She had been there 2 weeks.

She had called Kairon, let him know what was going on. Insisted that he shouldn't come. That she would be fine. Every conversation they had was short. Uncomfortable. The Captain as in control. It was the only way she figured she could get through everything. The Captain had become a fixture, but then she wasn't thinking about the loss or how it ripped her up inside. She was angry at the same time and her silence often kept her rage in check.

How could this have happened? Why? Who the kark did she have to beat to get through their damned heads that the innocents just want to live?

She was at the bar, going over the figures for the last year and trying to decide if it was worth it to run the place or sell it when the coms chimed. It was [member='Rusty'].

She hit the button, the display lighting up as she stood in the dark, a glass of whiskey on the bartop, while the hum of a generator to power the computers ran in the background.

"Hey, finish that Rimma trip?"

Focus on business.

 

[Rusty]

"Yeah, I'm finished. Everything went as planned."

It was hard to tell exactly where Rusty was at, judging by the background noise. It sounded like he was on a street somewhere. Maybe not a busy one, but there was some traffic and there was some conversation in the background.

"We had to push hard to make the deadline. The Warden decided to throw a tantrum when we got back, blew a coolant line. She's in drydock right now, crew's on shore leave."

It was clear he was walking, wherever he was. The unmistakable sound of heavy boots supporting a heavier being clomping on pavement was clearly audible over the call.

"Anyway, they're estimating it'll be two or three days before she's cleared to fly again. My friends are expensing the repairs in exchange for some gunsmithing."

Although they wouldn't say it over a comm, no matter how secure it was, both of them knew that Rusty's friends were the Shard Network. The Network had been fairly hands off with the pair as of late, mainly using Rusty's ability to cook up unique weapons in exchange for the seemingly endless repairs their ship required. The Wicked Grace spent most of its time idle these days, but the Grey Warden was no spring chicken, and keeping her in the air was sometimes a chore.

The sounds of the clomping boots got louder, as if somehow getting closer to the commlink. It wasn't until the Shard stepped across the threshold of the bar that it was clear that they weren't getting louder over the call, he had just been getting closer to the bar.

"Talk to me, Mal," he said softly from the doorway.

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

When he crossed into the barroom, she let out this sound like a quiet, exasperated harumph. She killed the com, bracing her head on her hands, elbows holding up the weight of the world while she fought back the tears. She took a deep racking breath that threatened to shake her shoulders, but instead she stood up, biting back the greif, the Captain back in charge.

"Nothing to talk about Rusty."

She went back to going over the figures, taking a sip of a glass of amber liquid. She wasn't drunk, she hadn't been hitting the bottle that hard, it made her emotional, and then she would cry. She had decided that she had enough of crying.

"These books are a mess. I swear she hasn't balanced them since I stopped doing it for her."

The bartop was incredibly enthralling at the moment as Mal wasn't sure she could keep it together if she looked at Rusty. She loved a very small group of people in the universe so losing one left a gaping hole so large she could have put the Deathstar in it. She didn't know grief, it was a stranger to her and now that it had made a place in her home, in her daily life, she was unsure how to dance around the new partner. Ignore it wasn't working but it was all the stoic pilot knew.

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

"Mal."

Rusty hardly ever called her that. Usually it meant that some serious [bleep] was about to go down.

Though he had put the HRD body into cold storage for the time being, his time in it had been highly educational. He recognized the signs: red, puffy eyes, complete with bags under them, disheveled hair, unkempt clothes, nails chewed to nubs. The Captain was in a state of emotional distress. It didn't take a genius to figure out why.

Rusty walked over to the bar and took a seat next to her. The stools were all industrial grade, which was nice. His robotic chassis would have turned an ordinary one into matchsticks. He had considered staying in the HRD chassis for this. Maybe it would have been easier for her to relate to a human face. But, after careful consideration, he had opted against it. The Captain had never seemed completely comfortable around the HRD, and at any rate, this was the face she knew. With the exception of the last few months, it was the one she had always known.

"Look at me, Mal."

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

Her chin quivered and screw up, as she pressed her lips together and shook her head violently.

"I don't want to."

She sat there, staring at the bar for what seemed like eternity but the cracks in the dam were already there and her silence was interrupted by the tracks of tears down her cheeks. She reached up to wipe them away, but she broke down into her palms, sobbing loudly, until she leaned over on his shoulder. He was droid chassis again under the coat and it only seemed to open the the flood of emotions more. The HRD was the face of a stranger. This was her Rusty and in his presense, she had an ugly cry.

Eventually, he had turned both their stools so he could hold her in what most closely resembled a hug, however, given pinch points and armor plates, it was not a very comforting looking hug to an outsider. For Mal it had been what the doctor ordered.

She finally stopped wailing, hiccups now stealing her breath. She was a mess. Bloodshot eyes, runny nose, puffy red skin all over her face. Grief makes one irrational. Crying makes one unabashed. Both of these together prompt wild confessions of things that were not necessarily true.

"Everything I love leaves me. Mom, you, Kai. I feel as empty as this bar. Broken into pieces I can't put together. I don't even know where to start. "

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

It takes long practice to be able to hug Rusty without walking away with some nasty injuries.

They had known each other for over three years before it happened the first time. The Captain's mother had been pressuring her about the bar, kids, settling down and finding a good man, so on and so forth, and in the aftermath, she had drank herself silly. Rusty had picked her up off the floor, half unconscious, and carried her back to her cabin. She had clung to him like a survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a rock, and somehow, had managed to come out of it unscathed. Ever since, in private moments, she would jokingly call him her rock. Every now and again she'd wake up after a bender with a bruise from an awkward pinch, but that never stopped her from wrapping him up when the need arose.

The last few months had changed things. They had drifted apart, partly because of his business, partly because of Kairon, and partly because of his reluctance to come out of his cabin on the Grey Warden during his off hours. They were hardly ever alone together anymore, and every day it felt like they got a little further apart.

None of that mattered now. Rusty held Mal, stroked her hair just so. There was nothing at all romantic about their relationship, even when the HRD might have made that a remote possibility. He was her rock, and she was his Captain, and that was all there was to it.

"I'm here now, Mal. And Kai would be here in a heartbeat, if you just asked. We're not going anywhere."

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"You have everything going on with Dressel. There's no room in what you're doing there for me. You're leaving a little bit at a time, you just call it work instead."

She hoisted herself away from him, reaching for the glass and draining it in a gulp before she tipped the neighboring bottle into it to pour herself another bit of numbness. She stared blankly at the shelves behind the bar, where glasses and liquors had once been on display. She was tired; sleepless nights were wearing on her and with the outburst, now she didn't think she could stop being honest about the things eating her up.

"I don't know how to ask. Mum never asked for a thing in her karking life, she did for herself and that was what she taught me. Take care of yourself because you can never count on anyone else to. What am I supposed to do? Tell you that you can't do your gun thing? Tell Kairon to let go of the Quin? Mum said people got their own paths and it's not your decision where they go."

She took a mouthful of the whiskey to punctuate her discouragement.

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

"Dammit Mal..."

Rusty sighed and shrugged off his pack. From within, he pulled out a 50 year old bottle of Whyren's Reserve. Before Corellia had gone boom, a bottle like this would have been extremely expensive, easily several hundred credits. Now the value was irrelevant. You simply couldn't get one on the open market, and if it hadn't been for that inventor's tournament, he'd have never ended up with one. Or that starfighter, come to think of it.

The Shard deftly snatched the glass from in front of his companion, pulled a fresh one out from under the bar, and poured three fingers of the amber liquid in it. He placed the glass down neatly in front of the Captain.

"If you're gonna insist on drinking, I insist you drink something worth the hangover."

She wasn't entirely wrong. They had been drifting apart as of late. His business on Dressel was supposed to have been a distraction, a temporary reprieve from the day to day rigors of smuggling work. But something had changed. The Grey Warden was a fine ship, but Rusty and the Quin crew never really seemed to jive. Meanwhile, Mal and Kairon had jived extremely well. The distance between the Captain and her best robot pal had grown gradually, but grown it had. Even when the others went back to their ship and they had tooled around in the Wicked Grace again, things just weren't the same.

"Your mum was a great many things, but an expert on relationships wasn't one of them. Okay, sure, we've drifted a little, but I will always be there when you need me. You just have to let me know because I am not a mind reader. Nor is Captain Rees, for that matter. How much do you want to bet he'd be here in record time if you called him?"

Rusty held out a commlink, daring the Captain to take it.

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"I'm not ready for him to see me like this. I can't hold it together, I don't even know how to try. I just keep thinking that I should have agreed to take the bar. I should have been here. Maybe she'd still be here if I had just done what she asked."

Mal shook her head at the comlink and instead reached for the Whyren's. She let the slow burn slide down her throat as she wiped away the moist tracks of newly shed tears from her splotchy, red cheeks. She stared at the bartop, lost in the regrets when her own comlink chimed again. She snorted derisively at it, shoving it away from her down the length of the polished wooden surface.

"Lars has called 3 times. I don't know what the hell he wants, but I'm not the least bit interested in his grief."

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

"If you'd agreed to take the bar, you'd have been killed too," Rusty said, a slight edge in his voice. "There's nothing you could have done."

He sighed and stared longingly at the bottle for a moment, regretting his choice in chassis. It might have made the Captain more comfortable, but he could have used a drink right about then.

"Look, just talk to Kairon. I get it, you're a mess. But I promise he won't mind. It's probably tearing him up, knowing you're hurting and him being so far away."

That was a wild shot in the dark. Rusty had absolutely no idea what the scoundrel thought, but he was hoping his guess was right.

The Shard glared violently at the commlink when it buzzed.

"Lars can go [bleep] himself. If he wanted to give a [bleep], he had the better part of thirty years to do it."

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"Can I talk to him later? Right now, I don't want to think about my relationship or what I've screwed up. I'm in pain, Rusty. You've cleaned me up and helped me right my course more than once. You're my navigator. So let me just have this for a bit."

There are some moments where you need certain things. One moment, you might need a lover. One moment, you need your best friend. She didn't need Kairon right now. She needed the Shard who put IV's in her arm when she was hammered, who had her back in a fight, who threatened to break her hands if she gambled and always talked to her straight. Rusty was walking catharsis, and it was just what the doctor ordered for the moment.

"I have to make a decision what to do with this place. Either I fix it to run it or I sell it. I need to figure out what to do with mum's stuff. I never wanted this bar when she was alive. Now I feel like it's all I have left."

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

Rusty nodded.

"Fair enough."

He listened to her predicament about the bar. It was a tough call to make.

"You could always fix it up and hire someone to run it. You'd go nuts in three weeks if you tried to do it yourself, but that doesn't mean you have to get rid of it. Let someone else handle the day to day, and you'll always have a place to come back to if you need it."

He thought for a minute.

"A place that isn't a flying mechanical breakdown waiting to happen," he amended.

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"Hey, I like flying mechanical breakdowns!"

Her mock offense made her chuckle, which turned into a laugh and for reasons she could not describe, she could not stop laughing. She laughed so hard, tears sprang back to her eyes, but instead of mouring, they marked the first moments of joy she had experienced in a couple weeks. She let them come, snorting at her tears, laughing at the snorting and ending with a belly ache and her sides in fits of pain. But she felt a hundred times better already.

She looked at the whiskey, and instead went behind the bar for a glass of water. Holding it with two hands like a life line, she was still giggling about flying breakdowns when she looked up at him.

"What am I going to do with you? I'm lost without you, you know."

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

"I suspect you'll figure out something to do with me," Rusty said dryly.

It was good to hear the Captain laugh. He knew she wasn't out of the woods yet, but she'd at least taken the first tentative steps towards the treeline. Grief was something he was familiar with. It had landed him in a dark hole that had taken centuries to climb out of. If it wasn't for the Captain, he'd still be stewing in hate, every waking moment bent towards revenge against the descendants of the people who had all but wiped out his people. He knew some in the Network thought it baffling that a mere human could so profoundly change one of their own, but he didn't much care. For a bunch of inorganic crystals, the Shards could be awfully hidebound.

If it wasn't for the Captain, there would be no RCFC. He wouldn't be on the shortlist for folks who needed high end weaponry. He'd be alone and angry and, given the recent uptick in Sith fighting power, probably dead.

"So while you were here, I went out and got us a new toy," he said, pulling up the specs for his shiny new fighter on the datapad. "Wanna take it for a spin after you sober up a bit? I know freighters are more your thing, but man, this thing is something else."

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"Rusty, this is a starfighter. Am I supposed to pop you out of that chassis and tape you to the instrument panel?"

Mal chuckled as she looked at the datapad. It was a slick looking machine, Mal had a soft spot for the Nubians. They looked fast and sleek and she adored the curves. She never got to fly starfighters. She had never made the cut at the academy. She could fly, but she didn't have the cocky attitude of the dogfighters. She preferred something with some heft to it. She could pilot a freighter like no one's business.

She spun the datapad back around, a whistle escaping her lips as she reached for the Whyren's now.

"Where'd you pick that up? Dressel doing that well for ya?"

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

Rusty pointed towards the rear of the cockpit on the hologram.

"It's a two seater, Mal. I won the thing by sitting in a lab and building something ridiculous out of random crap live on the holonet for thirty hours straight."

The little ship was blisteringly quick, and about as agile as a TIE fighter. The Shard was good, but he wasn't anywhere near good enough to push it to its limits.

"If you're really nice, I'll let you ride up front," he said sweetly.

Hopefully, a spin in the thing would go a long ways towards cheering the Captain up. He'd yet to meet a pilot, freighter, fighter, or otherwise, that wasn't at their most joyous when pushing their machine to the ragged edge. It was impossible to blame all of the Wicked Grace's mechanical troubles on its age. With a ship like this, she'd be able to well and truly get the lead out.

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"You got her on the Warden right now or did you leave it on Dressel?"

There was a glint in her eyes as she watched him tap the screen to show it was plenty roomy for two in the cockpit. One good thing about Shards, they didn't have the same problems with G forces and motion sickness that organics did. She could really pull some stunts in it and not have to worry that Rusty would lose his lunch.

But...that was for another time. Right now, she had enough liquor in her that operating a pallet jack was probably inadvisable. That thing deserved her at her best. This wasn't currently it.

"Alright, I'll take you up on it. When I'm clean and sober. Right now though, I'm still wrapped in boozy numbness so tell me what you've been up to. Any interesting customers? Any interesting guns?"

There was a waggle to her eyebrows, and she sipped the whiskey, waiting for him to spill it. For a while, it felt like the last few months hadn't happened.

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

"Yeah, I could fit a squadron of the things in the Warden," Rusty replied. "Soon as you get sober enough, we'll take her up."

The Shard couldn't grin when the Captain asked about any guns, but he sure as hell gave that impression. She knew him well enough to read his body language at this point, he was fairly sure.

"Oh Captain my Captain, I'm going to have to introduce you to my latest lady friend. Lemme tell you all about Olga..."

For hours they sat there, talking, laughing, occasionally crying, and generally carrying on like they hadn't in months. Gods, how long it had been? Going back, Rusty figured the start was probably their capture and subsequent abuse at the hands of the Techno Union. Maybe that wasn't the precise cause, but the timing was about right. Oh well. It didn't matter, not now. Not today.

At some point, the Shard looked outside and noticed, much to his surprise, that it was dark.

"Cripes. It's getting late. What's the game plan? Stay here and drink the night away, or try and get some rest?"

[member="Malia Afredane"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"I better try to sleep. I haven't really slept well in days and I'm exhausted. I feel tired now though, instead of just numb."

She trudged off her stool and started to shut down the generators and the systems, dumping water glasses in the sink and setting them aside to be taken care of later. She knew Rusty was right. There didn't need to be a decision right now. Business could wait, the bar was damaged anyway. In either case, it would help her to just go ahead with the claim to repair the place. She could hold off on figuring out the next after it was done.

She looked up at the towering Shard droid above her.

"Thanks. I owe one. Another one."

[member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

The next morning, Rusty was sitting at the bar, medkit at the ready. He already had an IV prepped and ready to go, on the off chance that Mal was cataclysmically hungover. It wouldn't be the first or even the 101st time.

It had been a long night for him. Balmorra was still in the throes of recovery from the recent battle that had swept over the planet. There was a lot of money to be made off assisting in rebuilding. The Shard disapproved war profiteering on general principle, but there was a difference between that and what he was trying to do. There was always an element of capitalism in endeavors like this. Even the most kindhearted of suppliers couldn't afford to give away their wares for free, and the vast majority of independent shipping that made up the backbone of the midrange galactic economy already lived on tight margins. They had to cover their costs, or they couldn't fly.

What Rusty did was help facilitate affordable resupply for the pilots.

Price gouging supplies for refugees and those in rebuilding was frowned upon. Someone had to pay for this stuff, but the folks in need were getting what they needed. On that end, supply side economics was temporarily suspended. For everyone else in the middle, things were a little bit less noble.

RCFC had decent contacts all throughout the galaxy as a result of his weapons sales. There was a fuel company that typically operated in the Expansion Region that had good prices, but not much in the way of contacts out this way. So the Shard hooked them up with a couple of local companies that were making bank selling fuel and other supplies to the freighter captains running cargo back and forth. By making the connection between the two, the fuel company was able to get a piece of the action, the locals were able to drop their prices and become more competitive, thus bringing in more business. And Rusty was given a hefty finder's fee for putting the pieces together.

So when Mal came down in the morning, there was a credit chip with enough funds to completely renovate the bar and set its finances in order.

"Howdy," he said, still hunched over his portable computer console. "Sleep well?"

[member="Malia Afredane"]