First Reply No time to

[Ellie Mors]

It didn't exactly surprise her that Gatz Derrevar wasn't aware of her ties to her sister - aside from her immediate family she was rather hopeful that nobody else was able to make that connection unless or until she wanted them to - but it still continued to tug at the back of her mind that somehow, someway, he knew of her enough to have found her out and known what it was she'd done for a living as well as for whom. Her friends were the chance encounters she made every time she stepped off of or onto a ship throughout her travels, people with whom she stayed with while she was in town rather than living in a new hotel room every other week. There were a few people she'd either become friends with or lost contact with that wouldn't have even the slightest hesitation in talking about her - though, aside from her name and the line of work she was in, they didn't really know all too much about her, and it was fairly obvious that whoever had linked Gatz up with her knew even less.

She shook her head, to confirm that she was, in fact, not a Sith by any stretch of the imagination, accompanied by a verbal confirmation by way of Mmhm.

Deciding that there wasn't any need for her not to sit in the open co-pilot chair Amara took the seat without much consideration on her part. "Drink, gamble, find a new play to stay once wherever I'm sleeping stops being a good spot to be in." She rattled off, taking the spare moment to glance down at her nails now that they weren't trekking outside in the evening gloom. "Normally I'd have been at a club somewhere, if business hadn't tied me down to smuggler dens for the week." Amara admitted as she settled in and tried to position herself comfortably in the seat. "You?" She asked, trying to keep the small talk flowing. "Assuming you don't get up to, um, 'murder and mayhem'."

It was a bit refreshing that the first person she'd divulged to about her paranoia didn't seem quite so overtly judgmental, granted she was also giving back a large heft of credits for him to keep quiet so it could very well be the money talking, but she had a feeling that there were quite a few people that wouldn't share his line of thinking - putting aside the family that she hoped had either forgotten she existed or hadn't even realized she'd stepped out of the bacta tank that had been keeping her alive for the vast majority of her life.

 

[Gatz Derrevar]

Ship: The Red Night
Weapons: Blaster Pistol
Tag: Ellie Mors

The sublight engines gave off a high-pitched whine as they heated up for a flight. Gatz raised the landing gear, and let the repulsorlift carry The Red Night's heavy bulk away from the landing pad, before throttling up the engines with a roar. They sped away from Nar Shaddaa's cityscape, letting the slimy Hutt world begin to fade away behind them.

Amara asked after his own pastimes, which were a little bit more adventurous than her own.

"I spend most of my time with Jedi, believe it or not," Gatz shrugged, "trying to do a little good, here and there. Freeing slaves, finding kidnapped children... that's the kind of thing I do these days. But there was a time when I spent most of my free time in bars. I miss those days."

Not really. What he missed was the lack of guilt. What he missed was being able to care only about himself, and not being bothered by the problems of others, and how he had contributed to them. He missed being able to sleep, without seeing the faces of the men he'd killed. He missed being able to daydream, without dwelling on how many people had died overdosing on spice he had delivered to their worlds.

He missed being at peace.

"But hey, if we pull this off, maybe I'll take a vacation from all that. We'll go gambling at one of those fancy casinos, not the hole-in-the-wall casinos people like you and me are expected to stick too."

Gatz hated being treated like gutter trash. Most because he was gutter trash. He was dirt, born from dirt, and the galaxy had a way of reminding people like him of that. But maybe, with some money in his pocket again, people would start to see him as more than just another lower-class citizen.

 

[Ellie Mors]

She gave him a sidelong glance paired with something of a smile, a warm one even, at the thought of doing something so altruistic - of being able to do something so altruistic even. It wasn't that she wasn't capable of being so kind, it just seemed like there never was any time in her life to do anything except survive and the few moments in between that were there to breath. Part of her had always wondered if other people that lived their lives in the underworld had managed to get a handle on their own lives in a way she hadn't, and it sounded like he might've if his nostalgia was anything to go off of, but for her the life of crime and less ethical work was anything but glamorous. It had its moments, the singular nights where she'd be dressed to the nines and feeling larger than life, but those were sandwiched between months and months of monotonous grind, weeks of endless flights from planet to planet and city to city, and nights manipulating men and women into thinking she was the next long-term plan for their futures just so she'd have a place to stay.

Deeply unsatisfied wouldn't even begin to cover how she felt about being suckered into this life, but it was still better than the alternative - sitting in a bacta-tank, wondering if she'd ever see something other than bleached walls and artificial sunlight. Still, she couldn't help but feel the need to put her own thoughts out there after he'd offered up his own. "Mmm, really enjoy living large, don't you?" Amara asked, referring to his apparent fondness for gambling and the lavish casinos in particular. "I like things a little more quiet, the larger-than-life appearance is just part of the uniform for me." She admitted. "I think we all want what isn't for us, though; maybe that's a sign that you're better off doing the things you've been to make life better for other people, you know?" It wasn't the first time she'd tried to push someone towards a particular lifestyle and it definitely wouldn't be the last, but it was quite possibly the first time she'd tried her hand at it just to keep someone from making a mistake - usually she was the mistake, and the pontificating was to get people to not realize it.

"I don't know many people like me that would give up as big of a steal as your making this Kragan Garr's stash out to be, especially not to willingly give it to other people instead of keeping it for themselves."

Gatz Derrevar

 

[Gatz Derrevar]

Ship: The Red Night
Weapons: Blaster Pistol
Tag: Ellie Mors

"I wouldn't say I enjoy it," Gatz admitted quietly, "but it's the decent thing to do. And I've got a lot of not-so-decent things to make up for."

Some things were worth the struggle and effort. He had to believe that. Otherwise, why was he doing this? Risking his life day in and day out? Gatz found it easy to make that sacrifice, to trade his safety and sanity for the sake of others, but he couldn't pretend that it wasn't starting to take a toll on him. He was tired. Bone tired. And he'd collected more scars in the past year alone than he had in the rest of his twenty-four years of life.

But there was some good in this galaxy. It was worth fighting for. He believed that.

"You're probably right," Gatz let himself chuckle, "if I really yearn for the good ole days, then it probably means that I'm right where I'm supposed to be."

The Red Night broke through the atmosphere of Nar Shaddaa, leaving Gatz free to throttle them up to hyperspace with the throw of a lever, and the blinding passage of azure stars. Finally, away from the Smuggler's Moon, Gatz finally felt a sense of peace. Hyperspace was his refuge; the place between stars was where he was safest.

"We'll make a stop in the system over, get you a set of clothes and some toiletries. Something nicer than the scraps sold on Nar Shaddaa. Everyone deserves better than that."

Well, maybe not everyone. But anyone willing to face down a crime lord, all to put an end to the suffering they inflicted was deserving, Gatz thought. He didn't know Amara, beyond the little she'd shared, but already he got the feeling that she was more altruistic than she had initially let on.

 

[Ellie Mors]

She shrugged, doubting his idea of indecent would've even registered as offensive to the vast majority of people she'd worked with in the past, but didn't bother to deny him whatever justification it was that he felt he might've needed in order to continue on with his whole turning a new leaf ordeal. The man was, as far as she could tell, more or less a reformed criminal, a smuggler with some kind of a conscience and even more of a desire to make up for something he clearly thought he'd been doing wrong. As much as that was admirable, even to her, there wasn't much room in Amara's life to give time to other people. "It almost sounds like you don't like Nar Shaddaa." She said, rather absent-mindedly. Life there was dangerous, the people were crude, and it was filled to the absolute brim with human trash - it was obvious why a certain kind of person might not care for, perhaps even look down on, the planet - but it was still the world that Amara chose to come back to after every job that took her off of it.

Unless Gatz Derrevar was the kind of man that went out shopping for women's clothing on every planet he'd stopped at, or at the very least back on Nar Shaddaa, she wasn't quite sure where he'd get the notion that there was much of a difference in what she'd find there as opposed to, say, Coruscant. A different price, she supposed, and maybe a slightly different bent of fashion, but it wasn't like she'd bought the dress she'd been wearing off of some street vendor's cart. Most of the large businesses in the galaxy were only ever really owned by a handful of massive corporations - themselves owned by maybe a dozen individual people - but she supposed it wasn't something most people really ever thought about.

"If you don't mind me asking, what was it that caused you to look into asking me for this job of yours? Rather than contacting the Black Sun directly, that is."

It was a question she felt like he probably felt like he might've answered well enough when they'd first met earlier in the bar but it wasn't one that she was satisfied with - there were dozens of people who did more or less the same job she did within the syndicate, several who were much better at it and were a bit more inclined to getting involved in heists themselves. Amara, on the other hand, was not the kind of woman that generally got directly involved in any of the dangerous parts of a job - money she handled was, usually, credits already in the Black Sun's possession or otherwise accessible through digital means, and her smuggling efforts usually entailed her carrying contraband on her person so that the profiling efforts that customs generally employed wouldn't suspect a thing. "Not that it'll change anything, mind, just curious why specifically me, if there even is a real reason behind it." She said.

 

[Gatz Derrevar]

Ship: The Red Night
Weapons: Blaster Pistol
Tag: Ellie Mors

"Nar Shaddaa is where I started making the mistakes I've made," Gatz admitted.

So, no, he wasn't all that fond of Nar Shaddaa. He'd seen too much cruelty, experienced too much cruelty, and inflicted too much cruelty. He was Nubian through and through, but these days, he felt as though he belonged more to Nar Shaddaa than he ever had to Naboo. Even now, as he tried to rectify his mistakes, the Hutt's filth still clung to him.

And it always would.

Amara asked a different question then, and Gatz supposed it was a fair one. One he would have expected back at the bar, but he was happy to answer it even if it was a little belated.

"I know a guy who knows a guy who knew of you." Gatz said simply, "as for why I asked for you to help me without the backing of the Black Sun? I... prefer not to work with criminal organizations these days. Even if it was just for this one job, it would be like I was taking one step forward, but two steps back."

Gatz didn't believe in redemption, and probably never would. But he did believe in doing better; in making better choices. But pitting one criminal organization against another, which would inevitable end in the deaths of many, just to save his own skin? That wasn't doing better. That wasn't choosing better.

"The truth is, it's really just coincidence," Gatz shrugged, "we happen to have a very thin connection in the criminal underworld. I just followed that thread until I found you. Could be a lot worse: I could have happened on some ugly Trandoshan, and not someone as easy on the eyes as you."