The Rebel Queen - Poe Dameron

Chapter XXII: Drifting

**Unedited

/ May the 4th be With You! /

P.S: entries on Sybil mythology are in the Rebel Queen's "Codex" on AO3**

Banden

The racetrack was unbearable without the sound of racers gliding past. Worse without the idleness of noise he was accustomed to; no engines stalling or machinery vibrating on standby.

He'd walked the bazaar a few days back, toiling away his hours of indecision and quiet in the hopes the markets would be distracting enough. Full enough. But the dug-out, warren-like kiln structure of the bazaar was hollow. Only wind whispered there. Stalls full of things but empty of purpose. Food and supplies were the only things scarce.

The mines were worse off. Stripped not of ore but of work. Now the shafts and caverns and outposts for refuelling the tunnellers and water tanks were repurposed into shelters for the non-fighters. On the surface, small insurgency groups kept the militia near Karas busy.

If Banden got close enough to the ancient city, he'd start to hear the bristling of a poor-man's war. And each night he'd look up at Yotai, he'd be disappointed to see it lit up like a city of lights, that great, big war machine of a moon.

Thesmora wasn't the same.

And if this civil war persisted, there'd be little left to salvage to forge a way back to life before.

The light near his comm-system blinked red, and he took a moment to comport himself, then he grabbed two tumblers from his desk and broke the seal off the thirty-seven-year-old vintage cask of Coruscant wine.

"Open doors," he spoke to the security system wired throughout his establishment. The doors responded with a time delay of 3 seconds. He made a mental note to task Correy with running diagnostics on the system later.

Emory entered his office then, her gait relaxed. When she spotted the bottle on his desk, his head of security tilted her head up and to the left, a gesture that compensated for her lack of eyebrows to visibly raise.

"Is that judgement?" he fought the urge to laugh.

"We open the Coruscant wine now, boss? This mean we go to war?" Emory asked, her accent thin in the places the mountain tribe's dialects were thick, but thick in the places they were thin; she came from the oceanside, her tattoos bearing that pride, telling her story from dishonourably discharged Garrison grunt to fisherman to something neither here nor there in Thessi culture. An outcast.

"Our little Rebel Queen spoke with me, made a compelling offer," he poured the wine and his tattoo itched. With a gesture of his head, he offered the second tumbler to Emory. "But she is trained to do that: speak with that assuredness of a ruler, hold herself with pride she cannot possibly afford on her own merit. Her words could very well be empty. The cards in her hand could be a flush, at best."

"You thinking you both gamblers, both playing the same game. What if she's playing something different? All your time thinking up there"—she pointed to their ceiling, higher, past it, to the endlessness of space—"could be put to better use here."

"I am here," he lowered his palm down, trying to condense the power of the planet's gravity into a mere gesture.

His attention got caught by the hologram on the wall. The first big win of his career, even though he wasn't pictured in the photograph. It was of a pod-racer, hovering text displaying the words: 1st Place: Ashani tal Ei'rrie. In that memorialised moment, Ashani held up a trophy, smiling triumphantly beside her crew, a flash of something less endearing in her eyes, more prideful than the rest. She'd been the underdog of the racing season then, and not by chance either. Together, Ashani and Banden had come up with the idea of using losses as building blocks. Tailoring the odds, so that finally, in the last stretch, after she'd acquainted herself with all her competitors' tells and weaknesses, she could win by a landslide. All the luck she'd ever need condensed into tactics. A manufactured miracle. He'd very rarely been impressed by a person; even rarer that he'd be fascinated by someone younger than him and in many ways still naïve; it was the kind of admiration that made him weary of himself. The winnings allowed him to fund his way into infamy, and the racer managed to walk away from that life for good.