Strange Bedfellows

It was a strange cocktail of feelings that wrestled through the mind of Soto Terius as he stood and watched the sun rise.

There was a certain familiarity, a certain relief that came from watching Corell crest over the distant horizon as he watched a new day unfurl. He was home. Home. While fighting for the Alliance, he had never missed it, too busy driving forward to allow himself to look back. As soon as the Rebellion had ended, as soon as the war had turned cold, he had been able to do nothing else. It had ached inside him, a tether welded to his heart that pulled at him from across the stars, tension growing stronger and stronger with each fragment of news that filtered out from behind the blockade. He was here now, he had returned. From the gentle caress of cool Corellian air against his head, to the satisfying crunch of Corellian soil beneath his boots, to the very depths of his Corellian soul, it felt good.

Yet it was not good. Far from. If his eyes deviated from the horizon too far, he would glimpse the TIE patrols over the city across the plains. He would glimpse the bone-white daggers of Star Destroyers looming in low orbit, close enough to be visible in the Corellian sky by day or night. It would take macrobinoculars to see the Imperial walkers marching along Corellian streets, electronic surveillance to her the oppressive clank of their every step, but he knew they were there. He could feel them, stomping across his world, enforcing curfews upon the once proud and free citizens of Corellia. With a telescope, he might even see the blockade itself, swarming between the Five Brothers, making prison worlds of the homeworlds.

Even that would not allow him to see the worst of Imperial oppression, however. It was not enough that Empress Tarkin reached out and wrapped her oppressive hand around Corellia. It was not enough that a foreign Moff from Force knows where dictated the terms of how Corellians lived their lives. It was the fact that there were Corellians among them. Corellian officers in the Stormtrooper garrisons. Corellian Security enforcing trade sanctions and flight restrictions. Corellian sons and daughters commanding and crewing the ships of the blockade; and chief among them, worst of all, the blockade's commander-in-chief.

Brigadier Rinzai Terius.

Soto's jaw clenched at the mere thought of it. He and his brother had never quite seen eye to eye, even in their earliest days. Rinzai had a violence and a ruthlessness to him, a focused viewpoint that had clashed often with Soto's more open mind. In their youth, they had embraced it, made it part of their respective identities. Rinzai was the soldier, a decisive solution to every problem. Soto was the engineer, always prepared to invent and innovate. There had been a respect between them. An understanding.

This, though? This, Soto would never understand.

Things had changed over the years, but no matter how much Soto contemplated it, he could never quite understand where the two of them had diverged. Perhaps it was as long ago as the Clone Wars. When the conflict had begun, the brothers had set their differences aside, and been united in their reaction. Both had joined the Republic military; both fought to defend their homeworld, and the Republic it stood as part of. Rinzai had become a leader, and at first Soto had stuck to what he was good at; but circumstances had conspired to turn the engineer of a Corellian Gunship into it's Commander, and for a few fleeting years he and Rinzai had shared a common purpose; a common occupation.

Then the war had ended. Soto stepped down, and Rinzai had not. Perhaps his abandonment of the New Order was what had embittered Rinzai towards him. To Soto, his career at the Corellian Engineering Corporation was a continuation of his service, helping to adapt the transports and light cruisers of the Republic Navy into craft fit for Imperial service. When Soto looked upon the clean grey lines of the revised Gozanti cruiser, the subtle way in which the Star Destroyer delta had been massaged into the design, he felt a sense of pride. When Rinzai looked, perhaps he saw the work of a brother who had abandoned the noble cause of military service for the sake of credits and comfort.

Soto had often wondered why Rinzai had become a TIE Pilot. Perhaps it was compensation: a greater risk and potential sacrifice, to compensate for Soto's surrender. Perhaps he had just grown reckless, so eager for violence and danger that he was willing to risk his life day after day for the thrill of it. It had never quite cost him that, but it came close: the last time the brothers had seen each other was shortly after the accident, shortly after the news that Rinzai's injuries would prevent him from flying a combat starfighter at the Empire's behest ever again. Perhaps it all made a sick and twisted sense if you followed it through: obligation had forced him into that cockpit, and the Rebel Alliance had forced him out of it. Soto Terius, defector and rebel scum, was adjacent to responsibility on both counts. Soto supposed he could understand why Rinzai would blame him, and why his hostility towards rebellion was so relentless.

This though was a step too far. This wasn't hunting the rebellion: this was oppressing his own people.

Soto crouched slowly, fingertips pressing against the grass-covered ground of his father's grave. The headstone loomed, and Soto found himself struggling to look at it, struggling to make eye contact with the last remnant of the man who had cared for and disapproved of the both of them in equal measure, and made them vow at every opportunity that they would never allow anything to interfere with what mattered most: family.

A slow, soft breath escaped from Soto, almost as a sigh.

"Forgive us, father," he muttered, his hand raising to the gravestone, resting as if it were a hand on a shoulder, "For we have sinned."

Roz pressed the stim to her lips, and took a drag, long enough to suffocate the scoff that was brewing inside. From under the shade of a crooked fallow tree, where the morning's embers died, she watched, and waited. The wait was almost over. Hours had turned into days, fed upon a steady drip of information, nursing the rumours into fact. And here she was, at last. And there he was.

The last time she saw Soto Terius - then, Captain Terius - had been like any other day. They had been aboard a ship - his ship - surrounded by the buzz of military life. The tramping of boots, the clatter of rifles, the barking of orders; conversation had been cursory, and functional, because there was always a job to be done. When last they parted ways, there had been scarcely a second glance, because they always had tomorrow. Almost 3 years had passed since that day, and everything had changed.

In the military, change was something that happened to other people. A soldier's life was routine, it was all the small pointless things put in place to keep you from going crazy when you weren't shooting at someone. It was all bantha shit, but it was safe. That was, until the fighting stopped. Until one day, when someone signed a dotted line, and, with crushing banality, brought to an end everything they had fought for. They said it saved lives, but it felt like a betrayal, of people, of sacrifice, of the very principles that had become woven into the fabric of her being, vital, like arteries and muscle. The fight was in her blood, and she had not become deaf to its pulse, even if the rest of the galaxy had.

Corellia was the obvious choice. Never before had the cancer of Imperial doctrine been so apparent, than when it attempted to infect the proud Corellian will. High above, Star Destroyers hovered like carrion birds, and TIE's swarmed like flies, waiting for the great beast to finally expire. But they were all mistaken: Corellia was not dying, it was asleep. All Roz had to do was wake it, and watch, as the Corellian people stir, and shake off the shackles and the parasites with one mighty heave. Besides, she had never been one for watching fireworks on the holonet.

Soto was crouching beside the gravestone, now. A graveyard at sunrise. The scoff surfaced, at last. Only him. One last kiss before the stim was cast into the dirt, where it was crushed under her boot. Roz abandoned the cover of the fallow tree, and pulled her coat close as the cold morning air picked up around her. Being the only other person stupid enough to visit a graveyard at this unholy hour, there was no disguising her approach - not that there was any need to. Soto had the look of a man carrying the weight of worlds upon his shoulders. Not everything had changed, after all.

"Late to the party again, old man."

A smile tugged at the corner of Soto's mouth, but he didn't turn, didn't need to. That voice, that tone, that rebellious note of insubordinate disrespect; there was only one woman who spoke to him that way, the very same one he'd been dangling lures for the last few days. Part of him didn't want to turn, almost to the point of being afraid. In his mind, he remembered her exactly. He remembered her fierce eyes, that scowl on her brow, the fire in her soul that radiated outwards. But time had passed. Things had changed. Perhaps she had; perhaps he had. For a few fleeting moments, he clung onto the illusion that everything was the same.

"You know how it is."

The worlds tumbled out slowly, and softly, but there was an undercurrent to them, a bitter grating edge that was aimed more at himself than anything else. When he and Roz Coralix had first met, she'd made no effort to disguise her judgement of him. She had been fighting the Empire since almost the beginning, avenging Caamas, and Geonosis, and all the Empire's other atrocities while Soto sat within his sphere of denial at CEC, retrofitting Republic starships for Imperial service as if somehow that didn't transfer the blood from the Tarkin Doctrine onto his hands. He had joined the Rebellion after Ghorman, swept up in the influx of resistors spurred into action by Mon Mothma's words; the crop of rebels who knew only the Rebel Alliance and not it's ragged and dedicated precursors, for whom the fight was heroism and a new adventure instead of near two decades of struggle and war. How had she phrased it? What were the words that she'd used to cut into him.

"I got comfy."

This time he agreed with the sentiment, rather than railing against it. In his youth, he'd found justifications and excuses. He was just an engineer doing his job. He'd already waged a war against the Separatists. The rebellion had been terrorists, leftovers from the Clone Wars, they fought the right fight but the wrong way; there was an answer to all of it, a reason why he'd been able to stay asleep and not see the galaxy in flames around him. This time though, his opinion of himself aligned with what hers had been back then. Asleep was exactly the right way to describe it: asleep, because he'd been tired. Tired of the Clone Wars back then; tired of the Galactic Civil War now. The Alliance of Free Planets had brought their conflict to an end; it offered reprieve and respite, and Soto was too old and tired to refuse such a temptation.

But in peace, everything had fallen apart. There'd been General Thule, and the incident on Ossus, Terius finding himself deep on the wrong side of the line. It had cost him his command, and he'd surrendered his ship, taking off his fighter's gloves to once again expose his engineer's hands. The Alliance needed new ships, and Terius was exactly the man to help design them. It had all come full circle: his war was over, and he could return to the life he'd left behind.

At least he'd woken faster this time. He'd gone through the same motions but at a faster pace. He'd watched the Star Destroyer dropped onto Coronet; an act of pure terrorism to his mind. He'd watched the Empire respond, and he'd deemed it reasonable: the best way to keep the populace safe. Then the grip had tightened. The blockade had formed. That had raised his hackles, and he'd waited for the noble Alliance of Free Planets to swing into action as they had done in the face of Imperial oppression before. They did not. Not their place, they said. There was a whole galaxy to worry about; the fate of Corellia couldn't outweigh the fate of a thousand Free Planets. Soto Terius awoke, and he woke angry. The highly publicised death of Ecidae Mandrill had been the final straw: a leader of the Resistance, a Durosi veteran of the Galactic Civil War, cut down in the street like a dog by the Imperial Knights. Cut down on Corellian streets, blood that deserved better left to drain into Corellian gutters.

"Besides, the best mistakes are usually worth making twice."

At last he turned, jaw clenched with resolve, and skin tight across clenched knuckles. He leant into his anger, let it spread through his body like the warmth of good Corellian whiskey. This was how he wanted her to see him: filled with determination instead of doubt, ready to act not excuse.

"But I'm here now, and it's time I did my part. That is -"

His eyes finally settled on her, and his face split into a smile, pearly teeth in utter refusal of being hidden. The angry warmth morphed and mutated into something fond and familiar, the faint promise of a hearty chuckle lurking in the periphery of every syllable.

"- if you happen to know anyone who might be able to make use of me."

There it was, that smile he thought was so godsdamn smooth. Roz should have rolled her eyes at that, but she couldn't. To deny that seeing that face, again - a face that remained impervious to years - brought her anything but happiness, was to be dishonest. She was an honest woman. Always had been. But that did not make her soft. In defiance of the old man's charm, she buried her hands deep inside her coat pockets; there was a chance she might do something with them she might later regret. And she was not the hugging sort.

Her defences, however hard and unforgiving, and contrary to what she would ever admit, were not impregnable. A flash of those pearly whites wasn't about to make her weak at the knees, but to hear that warm and familiar voice, again? A deep barritone, with the capacity to boom like thunder, or flow like silk, and was, at all times, unfaltering in its sincerity. It felt like home. She glanced to the side - a damning tell - and wet her lips.

"You gotta work on that sabaac face, Soto." She advanced a few steps, weaving between the stones, but was careful not encroach upon the grave. Few were the folks, these days, who made it to Soto's age and could claim to having living parents. That was a mark of great privilege, or luck. Roz never put any stock in luck, it cultivated high expectations, and disappointment. With a tick of a gaze, she swept her old friend from top-to-toe, and back again. At last, she read the name on the gravestone, and gave a nod.

"Brought the old man up to speed on the great Corellian dream?"

"Which dream was that, again? Leave us alone, so we can do our own thing?"

It was an attitude that had defined Corellia for thousands of years. The notion of Corellian autonomy, of sovereignty, of their freedom to decide their own fates in their own ways, had been chartered into the very bones of the Galactic Republic when it first formed. More so than any other, Corellia had the fiercely protected freedom to withdraw whenever they liked, to simply shrug off the Galactic Republic like a winter jacket whenever things started to become a little too warm for the world's liking. That premise had defined Corellia as a state, and in turn had defined the collective personality of it's people. They were rebels and rogues, independent and carefree. You didn't control a Corellian, you appealed to them, knowing they wouldn't act unless it took their fancy. They ignored the odds, subverted expectations, and fiercely defended their liberty and identity. Woe betide anyone who generalised a Corellian as a mere human: they were their own thing.

That was the affront here: the Empire daring to oppress in the fate of that proud liberty. But then, the same fate had befallen Corellia a few thousand years prior, when the Sith Empire had besieged an independent Corellia during the Great Galactic War. One would have hoped that Corellia had learned from it's history; that they would be able to recognise a hostile occupation when they saw one, but thus far the Corellian people were - as a whole - taking the blockade lying down. Had their wills been broken, or were they simply so enraptured by the Empire and it's propaganda that they truly believed the iron Imperial grip around their throats was keeping them safe? Soto couldn't be sure which of the two was worse.

His thoughts drifted however, back to Coralix's original question. A slight sadness, or perhaps merely sombreness, tugged his brow into a slight frown, and diminished his smile like a sun disappearing behind clouds. "He always hated it when we fought," he offered in a quiet tone. "My brother and I. He always told us how important family was, and how we should honour that above all things. He was so proud to see both of us in Republic uniforms, united by a shared cause."

He sighed.

"It's a good thing he died when he did, in a way. It would have killed him to see how far we grew apart."

"There you go, blaming yourself for someone else's poor life choices." Roz didn't miss a beat. She knew, too well, Soto's fondness for beating himself up. In a way, it was what made him such a good leader, to hold himself to account and to shoulder the responsibility for everything and everyone around him. He carried too much, and she was not about yield any quarter to an argument that gave his scumbag brother a place to bury his sins. "Your old man was right about one thing: family is important."

He was having a hard time of it, she could tell. There was something about that gloomy tombstone that kept calling him back. Fine. If he would not go to her, she would go to him. To hell with personal space. The distance was closed in a few measured steps, and her hand took his arm with just enough pressure to get his attention. There were those soft brown eyes. She held them fast.

"And that's why I'm here." The pregnant pause stretched out long enough to squeeze out twins. "Krasst."

She shook her head in disbelief, at herself, more than anything else, and buried herself in pursuit of something more familiar. She produced a fresh stim, and lit up.

"Or maybe it's the destiny of every kid to become a bitter disappointment in their parent's eyes." The stim tip blossomed, and from behind a column of smoke, she afforded the old man a wry smile, "Gotta keep you grounded, after all."

Soto would be lying if he said that hand on his arm didn't hit him like a tidal wave. For all the progress the Rebel Alliance had made, there was an unspoken and often unrealised cost that came along with it. The Alliance strove for legitimacy, for structure, to Restore the Republic as it's nomenclative mandate made plain; but the larger it grew, the more distance formed between each member of it. Like an expanding universe, each point of light that had burned and struggled during the Rebellion's early days stretched further apart, and in the spaces that arose, structure settled into place, the formality and rigidity of protocol and procedure holding everyone around you at length. That was not to say that one did not care about their Alliance comrades, but it was a different affection, one interlaced with and defined by a sense of responsibility. For years, Soto had been a Captain, The Captain, and as much trust, respect, and loyalty as he earned by being that, those pips and bars on his uniform would always be the central definition of who he was.

Roz was not built that way. To her, he was still the raw recruit who showed up late, who earned her respect through grit and guile, who she'd once come to follow because he'd earned that from her, not because some sheet of flimsi from a man behind a desk twelve systems away insisted that she did. To her, there was not some sovereign boundary between a soldier and her commander, no stifling restriction of protocol there to prevent her from speaking her mind when she felt he needed to hear it. Not that he was her commander any longer, but still: old habits died hard, and yet Soto found himself unprepared for them.

Relief and regret competed with each other as her arm fell away. He remained dutifully silent, allowing her words to process over and over in his mind, lending the same weight he always did to her advice and counsel - especially at times like these, where she became the mouthpiece for what Soto needed to hear. The reverie didn't last long, though: that rare exquisite commodity - a smile from Roz Coralix - stopped it dead in it's tracks.

"That's the thing with dead parents."

He tried not to smile himself, futile an effort as that was. He stalled for time, reaching out to steal the stim from her lips, treating himself to a long drag that kept his mouth fortuitously occupied. The smile rebelled, broad and mischievous as he offered the stim back to her.

"They're always grounded. Well, the buried ones, at least."

"Making jokes on your old man's grave." Her eyebrows lifted, as bold an exclamation as she was prepared to give. The stim was plucked from his thieving fingers, and Soto himself was regarded with a probing sideways glance, "So you're a comedian now, huh?"

For all her posturing, Roz was pleased to see time had not robbed Soto of his good humour. His smile filled her with confidence that this was exactly where she needed to be, right now, freezing her ass off in a godsforsaken graveyard, first thing in the morning. She surrounded herself with people, real people, who laughed, and loved, and bled just the same as anyone else. Having a man like Soto Terius around was a good reminder of what they were fighting for. Her gaze drifted off to drink in the deceptively calm horizon. She nodded, mostly to herself.

"Good for you. Force knows we could all do with a good laugh."

She flicked the embers from her stim and watch them fade. The smoking was a crux, at the best of times; kept her from running her mouth off, when tempers were high, which was often, or from chewing out some unsuspecting newbie on their first day. But, right now? It was a poor substitute for what she really needed. You didn't spend the best part of your life fighting, without developing a soldier's appetite. Roz was a rancor, on an empty stomach, and she knew it.

"Come on, old man. There's a waffle place, nearby. They do the best tailring bacon in the galaxy, and I could eat a bantha, right now." The thought of food was enough to conjure a smile, but it didn't last long. She considered the grave, again, "I'll give you a moment."

A moment, as if anyone could possibly condense all that needed to be said into that short a time.

Soto remembered, vividly, the last time he and his father had spoken. He remembered the argument, the heated words, the hurtful comments that neither could ever take back: those were lodged in his mind like thorns, though for the life of him he couldn't remember what had caused it. Standing here, after so many years without feeling the eldest brother's gravity beneath his feet, there were so many apologies to be made, and so many questions to be asked and contemplated. Would his father have approved of his Rebellion, or would the old CorSec detective have condemned his unlawful actions? How would he feel about Soto's recent resignation and return: an act of laudable patriotism, or another example of Soto giving up? What would his father advocate: what advice would he offer, and what action would he condone, to help guide his lost and confused son onto the right path? Here, in the long and looming shadow of his father's grave, too felt every bit the young boy who had argued and battled with his father at every turn. A deep respect had formed between them in the years since, but it was a respect earned by clashes and combat. What Soto wouldn't give now for a clip around the ear and a few of the words of wisdom his younger self had been so ungrateful for.

"I'm sorry, Dad," he offered quietly; it was a moment of weakness, and exposure, though the soft volume of his voice was more a result of sentiment than the desire to hide his words from Coralix' ears. "I know it's too late to make you proud -"

The muscles in his jaw bunched as he silently chewed over his thoughts, an unrealised half a notion away from closing his eyes and trying to visualise his father before him. Instead his hand rose to his chin, smoothing thoughtfully through his beard. Did it matter any more what his father might have thought? Did it matter what he stood for, or which way his moral compass pointed? If there was one thing his father had advocated more than anything else, it was that his sons learn to become their own men, embracing the plans and choices that best suited them, outside opinion - his, or anyone else's - be damned. His father would have called him an idiot for letting CEC, the Empire, the Alliance, the galaxy, and everything else from shaping him as much as they have. If the world tries to break you, you turn around and break the world right back, a gruff, half-forgotten voice offered into his mind.I didn't waste my life raising you to be a nerf: stop following, start herding. The smile that formed at the fragmented memory was subtle, and strained, but at least it was there.

"But perhaps I can still make things right."

* * *

For the last several minutes, Soto had been trying to count the years. How long since he had left Corellia for the last time? Too long was the simple answer, but until now Soto had never quite been conscious of just how much time had passed. His best guess was thirteen years. That was how long since he'd resigned from the Corellian Engineering Corporation, sought out what would become the Rebel Alliance on Dantooine, and thrown himself upon the ire and mercy of Roz Coralix. Thirteen years, countless battles and on balance more victories than losses; countless breakfasts too, though never one quite like this.

It was funny the things you missed. The notion of a Full Corellian was something that had spread to almost every distant corner of the galaxy where humanity had ever set foot, but few worlds managed to get it quite right. They messed up the hash and the beans. They used Alderaani cut nerf bacon instead of the more slender and fatty Corellian cut. Soto remembered a heated debate with a starfighter mechanic from Stewjon about what constituted proper bacon - after a debate during which the mechanic had temporarily forgotten the concept of rank and respect, both had conceded that the other's cut had it's proper place, but neither was quite willing to accept that the word truly applied to the other. For Soto, that proper place was currently on his plate, draped across the crisp grid of freshly ironed waffles, drenched in syrup and with every imaginable adornment arrayed around it. If it was consumed as part of a cooked breakfast, it was there on the Full Corellian platter, fried into delicious oblivion and heaped into generous mounds. Sausage, shrooms, cheese hash, grits, biscuits, beans, three kinds of toast, two kinds of pudding, and enough eggs to populate a small moon. All of them were exactly as they should be. It wasn't the taste of a home cooked breakfast from his childhood. It wasn't the taste of the diner just down from the CEC offices, or the one he'd visited to sober up after a far too many nights of youthful excess. It tasted Corellian though, and that was what mattered. No odd metallic aftertaste to the sausages. No rubber texture to the eggs, and no making do with the same species for each instead of a different fowl for each variation. The right kind of fungi, the right kind of chopped and fried vegetables. It tasted how it was supposed to taste, and any Corellian with a tongue still in their mouth could tell.

His attention drifted to Roz, a satisfied ghost of a smile on his lips. "So what's the verdict? Better or worse than the approximation I used to throw together back in the day?"

"Mm-mm." The objection came from behind a mouthful of mushrooms and beans. Roz swallowed, and brandished her fork with menace, "Oh, no, you don't. You ain't making me choose between this, and the fried diabetes you served up at the ass-end of the galaxy. They are both what I would consider five star dining experiences. That's right. A compliment. You know how to make a girl happy."

Roz was in her element, half-full and with no shortage of food in sight. The chilly awkwardness of the graveyard had been banished by the familiar clatter and sizzle of Patrelli's Pitstop, she basked in it, drawing a sigh from the padded leather against her back. All around, the buzz of conversation filled the small-but-packed diner, against a mellow backdrop of old Corellian music. The smell of freshly-brewed stimcaf was rich, and inescapable. She needed another. Patrelli Galadd, the handsome proprietor, was about three sizes too large for his apron. He had the look of a man who had been carved from a giant kingswood, all chest, and shoulders, and arms. What hair he'd lost from his head had migrated south, sprouting from his face like the proud mane of a manka cat. He spoke softly, and smiled often, and, invariably, reminded her of a face she'd rather forget. She caught his attention with a raised finger, and tapped it on her empty cup.

"And one for my friend, would you, Pat?" She returned her warm attention to the old man, "Can't say I get to use that word too much. It's good to see you, Soto."

Not one to over-egg the pudding, Roz resumed her attack upon the half-demolished waffle, instead. All those years were melting away. It was funny how easy it was, with him.

"So, three years, huh?" She fired him a telling look across the table, "Figured you'd be getting fat behind a desk, by now."

"Well, not behind a desk," Soto countered, a hand patting his stomach for a brief moment, with a flash of a smile. The fact that his uniforms had grown a little more snug wasn't the only thing about him that had changed since his youth, though Roz had been there for most of the others. The hair - or lack thereof - was perhaps the most striking, and it had been the most impulsive too. One morning he'd walked into the 'fresher, looked at himself in the mirror, and had seen his father staring back. The beard had taken too much effort to be sacrificed on a whim, so it had been his hair that had gone, and hadn't been allowed to return since.

"Though not for their lack of trying. I was running with the Fourth out of Bothawui for a while, border patrols and the like, until I got caught up in that whole Thule business. I was a damned fool, let myself get lured into backing the wrong horse, and in the end I found myself on the discount rack during a sale on scapegoats. Nothing so harsh or formal as a court martial - the General had too many of us fooled for that - but they didn't exactly want a reminder of all that hanging around the capital, and no one was all that enthusiastic about accepting Thule's dregs and castoffs into their command."

The information was offered matter of fact, interrupted periodically by the odd mouthful of toast, bacon, and syrup-infused bean juice, but there was an undercurrent of bitterness that no amount of breakfast could fully mask. The flavour grew with each passing sentence.

"They reallocated the Destiny to Alliance Intelligence for border reconnaissance. Shipped off my crew to here and there. Shuffled me off to the Sluissi shipyards to help work on their new generation of Free Planets cruisers. A drawing board instead of a desk, same as the old days, which I kept telling myself was better somehow. But that -"

He sighed. The fork clinked as it was abandoned on the edge of his plate, still loaded.

"That isn't me any more. I can't just -"

He let out a small laugh at the irony, glancing at his surroundings.

"I can't just sit around. I'm getting too old for that. Not enough years left to stop trying to make the kind of difference that matters."

There were few things in the galaxy that could rob Roz Coralix of her prodigious appetite - in the struggle for survival, she had, long ago, learned to make the best of the lean times, and truly relish the days of plenty, like all wild things - but to hear of her commander, and dear friend, being treated in such a way? It was enough to put a clench in her jaw, so tight, it made chewing impossible. The whites of her knuckles were showing by the time she set her cutlery down with a clatter.

"Those fucking idiots. They ought to be on their knees, begging for you to stay. You see, this is what happens when you make deals with devils: the good people become disposable." She could feel it coming on, the rant, so she drowned it with a gulp of stimcaf. It lit a fire in her belly, to think of Soto losing his crew and being tossed on to the scrap heap with the rest of the veterans. He was a fighter, and a leader of men, not some stylus-pushing lackey. But, then, what use were soldiers in times of peace? Peace. A bitter huff was expelled like dragon's fire.

"Still, their loss is our gain. And we need someone like you, Soto. Now, more than ever."

There was no point being coy. A man like Soto Terius didn't muster out of the Free Planets military, then call in favours from the criminal underworld to smuggle him home just to get nostalgic and sentimental in a graveyard. He was here for the Resistance, and Coralix knew that. The Imperial Security Bureau would have known that too, if he'd arrived through conventional means.

Not that he hadn't considered it, of course. He'd agonised over his options, trying to quantify his potential value. With the Resistance, he'd just be another body, another voice complicating whatever bureaucracy led to the Resistance's variably questionable decisions. He was no Solo, no Starborn, no Tyree. Whispers of his involvement in the Resistance would not sway the tide of popular opinion, nor inspire more disenfranchised Rebels to flock to the Five Brothers. But as a prisoner? As a high profile arrest made by the Imperial Blockade? There was value in that, if the media corporations ever caught wind of the story. What a blow to the blockade's image: a Corellian son returning home, only to be arrested by his own bother; what a way to undermine Rinzai's position and authority, to unbalance the Blockade with questions over the integrity of it's leadership. With the right push, with the right people leveraging the situation in the right way, Soto in a cell could have been an incident that stirred up not just Corellian ire, but Free Planets involvement as well.

Ultimately, that had been what talked him out of such a reckless action: the Alliance. The fact that he had hung up his uniform wouldn't matter: the militant factions within the Empire would use him as a justification to pressure for renewed hostilities, and the militant factions of the Alliance would be eager but unprepared to see that transpire. At best, it would strain the fragile peace that the Treaty had established, and at worst plunge the galaxy back into active war, made all the more devastating by the Starkillers pointed at eachother's heads. For better or worse, the Treaty had saved lives, and the sense of betrayal and abandonment that Soto's Corellian bones felt was not enough to outweigh the safety of the trillions who had been protected.

This then had been the only logical course. Join the cause. Back to his roots. A man with a gun, and a fight. He supposed there were worse things he could spent his retirement doing.

"Someone like me?"

A soft cuckle accompanied his echo of her sentiment.

"Don't tell me the Resistance is short on weary old men with rusty trigger fingers."

"Not exactly."

Behind the chuckle and the charm was the real Soto, who knew exactly where this conversation was going. Roz wanted to assume it was humility that kept him from grabbing the bantha by the horns, but she couldn't be sure. It was like he said: he wasn't getting any younger. Perhaps, with the onset of his later years, the idea of command held no appeal for a weathered military man like Soto Terius. She couldn't blame him, having spent the best part of her rebel life dodging that particular shot. He was a damn good fighter, with grit and iron in his belly. And this was his home. If anyone had a right to turn in their pips for good blaster, it was him.

"It ain't your fingers, I'm interested in. I've seen you on the range." Her words were punctuated with a telling rise in her eyebrows. A long breath, then, to gather her thoughts, which tumbled out in a weary sigh, "The Resistance is divided. We have plenty of good folks, Rebel vets who know how to take the fight to the Empire. But then, there are the militant cells, who don't understand the meaning of patience and restraint. Don't give me that look."

With her index finger, Roz deflected the knowing glance fired at her from across the table. Whatever reputation she might have earned for herself, especially in those early days, she did not drop a Star Destroyer on a city. She'd had time to think about it, but her opinion hadn't changed: when innocent civillians become acceptable collateral in the war against the Empire, you have already lost the battle, in your heart.

"Then you have the patriots, who want just about anyone who isn't Corellian to be flung off their world. Alliance? Empire? It doesn't matter, to them. They fight for Corellian independence," she scoffed, adding, "As if that fight has ever gone away. Point is, with the Resistance being pulled in all these different directions, it's becoming impossible for any plans to gain traction. You could change that."

It would have been a lie to say that Soto hadn't considered it: the notion that he could change the Resistance for the better. Deep down, that was why he was here; why he'd left the Alliance behind, and come home. While the events that had sparked it all - the Treaty, the Destroyer, the Blockade - had simmered and congealed in his mind for months, it was the highly publicised death of Ecidae Mandrill that had been the final catalyst. It was the notion of a Resistance that had lost one of it's leaders; a Resistance that might be succeptable to his influence and steadying hand.

Yet, in that same thought, Soto had set aside the notion of leading. This was not the military. A new Commander was not simply assigned: they earned their place, rose from within, floated to seniority by the buoyancy of their reputation and the respect they had earned. It was how it had always worked, until the Alliance started getting a litttle too fixated on it's obsessions with legitimacy. Sato replaced by Syndulla. Raddus replaced by Ackbar. That was the path that Soto expected, and strove for. He would come to Corellia, make contact, and through Roz he would establish himself as an advisor, a voice in the ear of whoever was next to step up and take seniority.

What Coralix suggested, however? She expected more from him. She always had: either more, or better, whichever fit the situation they found themselves in. Indecisiveness gripped him like a stasis field. Over the course of his life and career, Soto had grown comfortable with the notion of command; but there was a subtle difference between the command he embraced - of a ship, of a unit - and the kind of leadership that something like the Resistance or the Alliance required. Soto was a strategist, and an engineer. He saw fixes and solutions, and he strove for them. Place him in a situation, give him a set of parameters, and he would determine the best choice. Leadership was subtly different, though. That required you to make the right choice, and that wasn't the sort of man that Soto knew how to be. Roz spoke of the fragmentation within the Resistance, the different viewpoints and attitudes; and who was Soto Terius to tell them they were wrong; that his version of right and wrong was any better? Soto knew what he believed was right, but lacked either the arroogance or the moral certainty to insist that his belief was gospel. Place him in a room with conflicting viewpoints, and he would argue his case; but ask him to mediate? Ask him to choose between options that he did not agree with, or satiate people whose loyalty and obedience he needed to win and maintain without the structure of a military hierarchy to encourage their compliance.

He shook his head, mind and mouth reaching the same dismissive conclusion.

"I'm no Garm Bel Iblis, Roz. I'm no Mothma, Organa, Dodonna, Syndulla. Give me a job, and I'll get the job done; but I'm not the man who decides what the job is. I'm not the man who decides if you did it the right way, or inspires people to want to do things differently and better the next time. You know me, Roz. I'm -"

He faltered slightly, the worse leaking from his lips almost sounding like those of his father, or his brother.

'I'm not the right sort of man for this. The cause is there, and I'll fight for it; but I'm not a statesman, I'm a commander. I'm a Captain. Give me a ship, and I'll steer it; but I don't know a damn thing about how to wage wars or fix the worlds. That's the business of better men."

"Give me a break!" The words took flight at once, harsh, and painted in stark shades of disbelief.

"You're a commander. You make tough decisions, every damn day. Don't give me none of this 'I'm just a simple man' bantha crap! Jeez! You know what? You're so gorram humble, you wouldn't lay claim to your own bowel movements."

She wilted, with an angry breath, bringing her forehead to rest in her hand. Soto moved in his seat, an indication he was about to address the sudden outburst, but she cut him off. One open hand raised, to hold his words at bay. She closed her eyes, shook her head, and gave a pointed mm-mm. She was not yet done. And, he would, of course, wait. While her temper seethed, and hissed, like a ferocious storm, Soto Terius was the ocean below, vast, and patient, and powerful. For all her bluster, she barely stirred the surface. That was the way it had always been. And she knew it was going to take something more profound to change the tide.

"Look, I'm not asking you to be a politician. I'm asking you to lead. Politicians are too smart for their own good. They appeal to the convictions of others, while a good man can always be trusted to do what he believes is right. That is what the Resistance needs. And I will take that, any day, over one of your so-called better men."

You didn't get compliments from Roz Coralix. Not the pandering kind, at least. She didn't hold your hand, and tell you what was good about yourself, or explain gently why she felt the way she felt: she smacked you up the side of the head, and used her stubborn bluntness to smash your flawed opinions to pieces, and beat her perceived reality through your idiot skull. Her only concession to civility was to brand Soto's doubts as an act of being humble, rather than calling him out for allowing his opinion of himself to differ so drastically from what she considered to be fact.

She wasn't wrong, per se, not when she weaponised her perspective in the way that she did. He knew how to fight this kind of war. He knew how the Rebellion had fought before it became an Alliance, and how you took the almost nothing that you had, and somehow turned it into exactly what was needed. For Soto, the insurgency had always been an exercise in abstract engineering: diagnose the fault, divine the solution, and fix as best you could with the tools you had available. Maybe that wasn't anything unique or special, maybe that was just his words for the same thing that everyone did. After all, if you stretched the definition and squinted hard enough, diagnosis and repair was a layman's description of medicine, social reform, education, and more. He might not know enough about biology or social injustice to quite understand what a fix looked like, but he supposed that was why you didn't rebel alone.

"Lets say I do this."

He regretted the words immediately, because despite the way he dressed it up as a hypothetical, he knew Roz would see it as a breach in his defenses, and you'd be a fool to bet against Roz Coralix when she knew that victory was within reach. He sighed, throwing a warning glare in her direction before she decided to start celebrating her win early.

"You realise that I wouldn't be able to do this without you, right? I can't Captain this Resistance of yours without a navigator to help point me in the right direction. If you think I'm just going to let you off the hook to fight and crack heads like the old days, you're mistaken. If I have to tumble down into this Selonian warren of leadership and misery, I'm dragging you down with me."

It was a playful threat, but also a warning. As much as it might have seemed like a jest, Soto meant his words. You didn't simply walk into a room full of rebels and assume command. Roz would have to vouch for him. She'd be gambling her reputation and the Resistance's trust in her on Soto's ability to lead: not just to make the right decisions, but to sway the free-thinking members of the Resistance into agreeing to follow them. These weren't soldiers of the Alliance, who'd ask how high when he ordered them to jump: any one of them could walk away at any time, any one of them could take issue with his choices and opinions. Any one of them could bring this whole ordeal crashing down, or summon Imperial death and destruction to rain down on their heads. Roz was asking him to stand up and challenge the Empire head on, but in doing so, by standing behind him, she turned herself into the barrier shielding him from anyone who might try to stab him in the back.

Soto's tone shifted, subtly, a new edge of gentle sentiment creeping into his words.

"You're willing to risk your life for Corellia, and that's damned noble, but are you sure that I'm the hand you want to double down on?"