Chapter Text
Zeb mugs him across the game table, heinous, dangling the tin empty from a claw-tip: “Just piss into this kaf-cup so I can sniff out what’s wrong with you. Specifically.”
“Hey, that’s mine!” Bridger squawks from the makeup chair, three kicks away. Close enough to reveal a shiver of pink at the hairline before Wren, pen flashlight gripped between her teeth, pushes him back down by the forehead.
“You don’t need kaf, squirt. Makes you short.” Zeb gestures grandly, handle out, and chucks the dingy drinkware across the rickety table, a clean lope above Wren’s brushes and paint-pots. The cup slaps into Kallus’s hand; the metal’s chewed-over at the lip, repulsive. Stickers striated with water damage.
“No one’s peeing on anyone,” General Syndulla, Hera, corrects from the doorway, adhering to the spirit of the debate. She lunges back into the crate of transducers: current, magnetic, thermocouples, antenna receivers. Nothing’s labeled, naturally. “Focus on the retrieval plan, please.”
The H’nemthe only parley with female leaders, and Zeb’s been preening to everyone about his rich-girl connect, so the two of them are to perform reconnaissance at the trine fete, where eligible females and avid males join in mutual assessment. Specifically, they are to prance and listen among the slippery ribbons and hex-spice praline, ensuring that Hera isn’t—waltzing into a festooned trap.
Meanwhile, this whole assemblage has the blood and ink tang of a tattoo parlor. In a compost bin. The on-base power-washer’s out of commission, so the crew has taken to loitering in increasingly fetid/esoteric garb—today is power-mesh singlets with T-backs, distressed belt loops and highly decorative ruffs, lit up like a Bothan mood ring. Judging from Wren’s grimace, Bridger’s squirming headtilt, the noise-reduction panels are riding up.
From a distant corridor, Jarrus’s embarrassing Piezoelectric rap-rock harmonizes with their bickering.
Zeb materializes some grub-ration, punctuating his arguments with taffy chew. “You’re not going to have your tidy Nutri-goo and imp medi-packs and appetite suppressants in the field. You’ll actually have to eat in front of people, and your delicate tummy might,” he waggles an allusive chord on his claws. “So! I’ll play hot doctor. As a kid, I took a course in, er. Sommelier?”
A solitary arm flap from Bridger, supine; Wren swats down the signal, plunking the penlight on his face. “That is not the word you’re searching for,” she grits, wiping her mouth on neon ruff.
“Scouts,” flattening the ration packaging, “jolly jumbuck, we’d split off to drive the herd into the mountain meadows for grazing, got to bead and dye our hair red, put the kit in a hairnet so the purple mice wouldn’t chew, let out the braids for the girls to see,” swallowing, reminiscent leer. “You’re not supposed to take a single bite alone—teaches ya to share,” he adds, not sharing—“and trust me, in those quarters, we got good at identifying ailments by smell, and of course, even on my home planet, we had to intensively study the lamest, worst species,” shredding the the palm-paper at corners with a final salivary pop: “yours.”
A crate-scrape, as Hera’s rummaging intensifies.
Corrugator supercilii lights the beacon; the irritation and the ache work in tandem, fast-twitch, slow-twitch. From his perch, legs crossed, he’d like to retort that he has improvised a variety of meals in service. Blood, for example. A reliably achievable food source—nutrient-rich, well-balanced, usually sterile. However, he’s received anonymized reportage (notes in Zeb’s handwriting, passed from Zeb during council briefings) that this manner of fact-sharing makes him “sound evil” and “uptight.”
Instead, he scrapes sticker gunk from Bridger’s cup, elbows pinned, sucking in his temper: “I doubt your rustic homosocial bonding serves, for a diplomatic mission to a high-context, notoriously endogamic culture.”
“Ehehe,” still bent over the ration-paper at the table, forearms loosely pulsed, one taunt-length away: “''bout to make a joke about your sex deficiency, but you just diagnosed it for us right here.”
At this velocity, a calming sigh exits as a hiss. “You registered me as a female virgin on the marriage market!”
“To be fair, they are super-weird with the boy-girl stuff,” Bridger chirps, unhelpfully.
Halo of ridges, Zeb stops folding the paper to force his mouth into a curtsy: “Gee, Agent Adenoid, I asked you, in all courtesy, how many guys you’ve slept with, and you said, ’None.’”
The paint-pots bounce, sneezing glitter, as Kallus slams the kaf-cup against the table. “I said, ‘None of your business!’”
The sound carries, unfavorably. Even the table seems chastened. Kallus sits down, huffs away the pert spill of glitter.
“Oh come on,” Bridger wriggles free of Wren’s headlock, vaults off the chair with a puff of guava blush. “These two dweebs are never gonna pull this off. Hera, send me and Sabine,” nose-modeling, fluffing the fake fur of his singlet, “Please? I’ve been practicing my dance moves, and I’d make SUCH a prettier girl at the ball than Kallus.”
“No,” Hera and Zeb say in flat unison (“Debatable,” Wren chokes out, dipping her brush in requisitioned cleaning foam).
The truth, collapsed: Knees to stone, his life’s a loop of tan micro 90 cord, strung full of sins. He could spend the remainder frantically reshelling, replacing each death-pellet with an atonement glow-rock, and still reach the end-tether with a fistful of beading. After all this negation, clipped, bloodied, who is he to peck the falconer, wheedle for clemency?
Yet, in Zeb-vernacular, he’d be royally kriffed before he let Jabba-Lando-Nosejob outbid him in spycraft.
The music accedes, Bridger retrieves his disgusting cup, the children scurry out after Hera, and he’s still adhered to this grimy tabletop, watching Zeb’s hunch, Zeb’s body at work. His own tongue’s a novice futon, hemmel straw. Trying to strip the curiosity from the intonation: “How many men have you completed—relations—with?”
Zeb opens his hands to reveal a mashed paper flower, lurid blue. Curling each of the four petals with Wren’s abandoned eye-brush, he makes a clack-cree-croo extruded kazoo sound, a beaded filler phrase in the H’nemthe language, ranging from irked present-dodge to rueful future-affirmation. Clack-cree-croo fresh honeyfruit to an old wound or vice versa, ablative, roughly translated as: Who’s to say?