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Thrawn, the first time he meets Major Veers, does not realize he is alien.
It is not until the third meeting, when he goes to find a lake recommended to him by the base staff as a good place to be alone, that he realizes.
The first thing he hears is swearing. Then he rounds the hill to see a large pair of tawny wings inked with back and blue. They are also caked with filth and dried blood and broken feathers. Major Veers stands on the bank of the lake, shirtless and in a pair of exercise shorts. The wings are his.
And he is attempting to clean them with a preening tool haphazardly mounted to a stick. It is not working particularly well, given that he cannot reach behind his wings at all.
Preening is a communal activity on Denon. Vital for mental and physical health.
(Veers knows this.)
But Thrawn has seen the looks he gets on this base, so obviously alien as he is. The disdain. The curiosity. The way that every single one labels him the alien naval captain.
Veers would have no community here if they knew.
(He’s clearly perfectly aware of that, too.)
(It’s why, after all, he’s out here by the lake where no one ever goes.)
Thrawn’s next step displaces a rock and draws Veers’s attention. He spins, wings flaring with agitation. His feet stamp a little, unconsciously. Another threat display.
“Captain,” Veers says tightly.
“Would you like help?” Thrawn asks. He doesn’t know why he offers. Perhaps… Perhaps it’s because he knows what this feels like.
(The Chiss are communal sleepers for a reason.)
(Weighted blankets are never quite the same.)
Veers weighs the question, discomfort and desperation and shame and distrust warring on his face. One of the wings shifts slightly, causing him to wince.
Thrawn reaches out a hand for the preening tool. Veers hands it over wordlessly. It’s a comb made of teak and had been hand carved by the major himself to resemble a stylized hawk’s beak.
“Scapulars first,” Veers says, turning away. His shoulders are practically rigid with tension. “Then coverts, followed by secondaries and then primaries.”
(It takes hours.)
(Veers has to first talk Thrawn through what all those terms mean, then how to remove mud and broken feathers, and then how to spread the powder down out properly.)
(But somewhere in there, as they talk about Denonian heraldry and flower language and humans who never pronounce their names correctly, they become friends.)
—-----------------------------------------------------
Veers had decided a long time ago that it wasn’t worth using the communal showers communally. Things were always much easier at 0300h, when he could turn on all the taps at once and stretch out his wings without being seen - he could bathe in peace, and so long as he picked up his feathers when he was done, his secret would remain a secret.
—------------------------------------------------------
Covell had decided a long time ago that it wasn’t worth using the communal showers on the Thunderwasp communally. Things were always much easier at 0300h, when he could strip off his binder without being seen - he could bathe in peace, and so long as he never left anything behind, his secret would remain a secret.
The water is running when Covell arrives to take a shower, and his first instinct is to turn around and leave whoever it is alone. After all, there are only so many reasons one showers at three am, and all of them boil down to “it’s none of his business” - plus there are certain conversations that will come up, and he isn’t in the mood to explain the intricacies of gender identity to whoever happens to be in there. On the other hand, he’s hot, sweaty, and more than a little curious… and in the end, that curiosity gets the better of him.
He makes a big show out of slamming his locker, loud enough to give his fellow soldier a heads up, and then he steps into the showers, arms crossed tightly across his chest just in case.
Covell isn’t sure what he expected to see, but it certainly isn’t the backside of his new commanding officer, frantically turning off what appears to be every shower in the facility. He can’t help but notice the thick ridges of skin that stick out from Major Veers’ shoulders, and he finds himself studying them for a moment before Veers frantically spins around, eyeing the intruder suspiciously.
“Sergeant Covell,” he says, “what are you doing here at this hour?”
“Same thing as you, I’d imagine,” Covell says casually, his arms still pressed tightly over his chest. “Showering.”
Veers nods, his gaze catching on something on the floor. Covell follows it just in time to see the major slide the tawny feather under his foot.
“Showering,” Veers repeats, trying to make the movement seem natural rather than an attempt to hide something. “I too enjoy a good shower at three am.”
Covell has to suppress a laugh at that. While Veers is no less intimidating out of uniform, there is something about the startled expression on his face and the water still pouring down on his head that makes the major seem… subdued, somehow - almost vulnerable in a way that Covell can’t quite place.
“Permission to speak freely and off the record, sir?” Covell asks, suddenly reminded of a rumour he had heard about the Thunderwasp’s newest addition.
Veers glances at him again, studying him, before nodding. “Granted, Sergeant.”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
Veers tilts his head to the side. “Come again?”
“We both have reasons why we prefer to shower alone, secrets that we’re keeping to ourselves for our own safety. We could pretend this never happened and hope we don’t run into each other like this ever again, or we could exchange secrets and have each other’s back. Something, something, stronger together or whatever that speech you gave earlier was about.”
Veers is silent for a heartbeat, then two. On the third, an absolutely massive pair of tawny wings sprout from the ridges on his shoulders, with smaller feathers sprouting from the back of his calves as well. “Well?” He says, halfway between pleading and accusatory.
Covell finally lets his arms drop, revealing the well-endowed chest underneath. His hands hover over the towel wrapped around his waist before he lets go of that too. “Mine’s not nearly so dramatic, I’m afraid.”
Veers lets out a long breath, his whole body relaxing a little. “You’re…”
“Transgender, yeah. Still saving up for surgery, since even officer’s insurance doesn’t cover it,” Covell says, wondering if it’s impolite to stare at the massive wings. “Not that you need surgery to transition, of course, just… for me, I think I’d be more comfortable, you know? Like my outside matches my inside.”
“We call it-“ Veers makes some sort of chirping noise before continuing, “loosely translated as ‘bearer of the wrong plumage.”
Covell smiles, following the motion of Veers’ wings as he speaks. “And you’re Denonian, right?”
Veers nods. “Hence the late night showers. I also know a thing or two about not feeling comfortable in your own skin.”
“Does it hurt?” Covell asks, gesturing at the enormous tawny wings. “Holding them in?”
“Sometimes. It’s like sitting in the same position for too long, they get cramped and twitchy, but it’s better than the alternative.”
“Even if…” Veers gestures to the feathers on his back, a resigned expression on his face, “sometimes it’s a little awkward.”
“Do you want some help? Since I’m here anyway…”
Veers looks conflicted again. “Captain Thrawn sometimes assists me, but…”
“Just tell me what to do, Sir. I’ve got your back.”
“Max,” Veers says quietly. “Call me Max.”
Covell lays a single hand on Veers’ back, where feather meets flesh. “I’ve got your back, Max. I’ll cover you.”
—---------------------------------------------------------
Major Veers is not quite pouting but Covell thinks it would take much for that expression to slip into one.
“I hate molting,” Veers huffs. He’s eaten through nearly the entire bag of sweet jerky as Covell watches. Veers had said something about needing a lot of protein when he molted but that bag had been the size of his torso. “It’s itchy.”
“Surely it’s not that bad,” Covell says but he’s sure his expression is too amused to pull off the sympathy he’d been going for. Veers looks like a mangy pigeon.
“It’s going to last all month,” Veers says, looking extremely displeased. Then he yelps as Thrawn sprays him with a squirt bottle. “Thrawn, what the hell?”
“According to my research, warm water helps decrease the itchiness caused by molting,” Thrawn says and sprays Veers again.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------
Eli had known Maximilian Veers had a sister. Eli had known that his own sister’s girlfriend had a younger brother she referred to solely as “Little Max”. He had not realized that “Little Max” and Thrawn’s “good friend, Maximilian Aurelieus Veers” were the same person.
He had known that Emme is Denonian. He had put together that Veers is Denonian after analyzing the frequency and times that Covell and Thrawn booked a specific hanger for “solo atmospheric flight maneuvers”.
Emme had been in the ISB for as long as Eli had known her. She had told him that she would be visiting the Thunderwasp today. But when he’d asked Thrawn about her arrival, all he’d gotten is an ominous chuckle and a hanger number.
He’d gone, of course, eager to see his friend.
He hadn’t expected to find her with her tawny wings unsheathed, in a full dive, chasing after a fleeing Major Veers.
“I only broke my ankle this time, Emme, I swear!”
“What the kark do you mean this time, Maximilian Aurelius Veers?”
Wait.
ISB Agent Emme Veers shares the same blonde hair as her brother, though her eyes are a piercing green instead of grey. They have similar wingspans but Emme is slightly taller and broader in the shoulders. The lines of their jaw are the same and the shape of their cheekbones are so remarkably similar that Eli doesn’t know how he hadn’t recognized their relation before.
That explains all of the things that Veers did that triggered familiarity. The way he squares his shoulders when facing an adversary matched the stance Emme had fallen into when meeting his… less than approving parents the first time Eli’s sister had brought her home. The same glare. That little quirk to the major’s punch that he’d said he had learned from his sister. Eli had thought the similarity a Denonian thing because of the differing muscle arrangement but Veers had literally learned how to throw a punch from Emme. From his older sister.
And then Veers and Emme twist and spot him.
(“You know each other?” Veers says, sounding utterly baffled.
“I’m stationed on Lystra, Max,” Emme says, rolling her eyes.
“That doesn’t mean you’ll know every Lystran I could possibly meet in the galaxy!”)
—---------------------------------------------------------------------
Veers hears the little disturbance of air too late. He turns, tries to dodge aside, and fails to get out of the way of Fausten’s flying tackle. He swears and wheezes as his cousin’s full weight hits him in the chest.
“I’m going to find whoever gave you karking stealth wings and punch them-”
Fausten raises an eyebrow at him. “Are you sure about that, baby cousin? Because mother may have become a novelist but she still keeps her hand in with those throwing knives.”
Veers pauses in his attempts to shove Fausten off. Sighs.
Fausten grins, triumphant.
—-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerjerrod is huddled behind a half destroyed wall. His security lead has one hand on his shoulder, pressing him further down and is firing with the other around the edge of the wall. A body in white plastioid lies inches from him, a large blaster hole burned through its back.
That shot had been meant for him.
Another member of his detail, pinned across the courtyard, falls to a second sniper shot.
“Damn it,” barks the man with his hand on Jerjerrod’s shoulder. “Where’s the back up?”
“Commodore Thrawn deployed it ten minutes ago,” says the man on Jerjerrod’s other side. He’s positioned so that if a rebel comes around that side of the wall, his entire body is between Jerjerrod and them. That would make him the fifth man to die in his defense in the last fifteen minutes. His glance strays to the dead man in front of him again.
The man gently pushes his head down so he can’t see the body anymore. “The comms officer says that the first man should be here in a minute and that the rest would be close behind.”
“Why would one man get here first?” the head of Jerjerrod’s detail snaps. Jerjerrod really does need to relearn their names.
The hand disappears from Jerjerrod’s head, allowing him to sit up as the trooper whips around his own edge of the wall to fire off two shots.
“I don’t know sir,” says the other trooper, returning his attention to the conversation. But even as he says it, the window the sniper had been shooting from bursts from the inside. Two figures tumble out, one in imperial grey and the other holding a long rifle. Then the imperial soldier pushes away from the sniper, massive wings unfolding from his back. There’s a stunned silence as he beats at the air to gain hasty altitude. The rebel he had been grappling with hits the ground four stories down with a nasty crack that rings in the sudden quiet.
Then the alien officer, because it must be an alien, twists and dives. He plows hard into one of the other shooters. He pulls the deton launcher from the rebel’s hands, spins, and fires at the other insurgents. There’s a brief scream and a flash of fire.
A man tries to sneak up on him, seemingly hidden from the alien’s view by his massive wings. Then the alien turns, dropping low. His wing shoots forward as he spins. And then, clear in the silence of hastily stopped violence, the gurgling sound of a slit throat accompanies a spray of crimson that drenches the alien’s gaberwool uniform.
Both the alien and Jerjerrod’s remaining detail do a quick sweep for any other active rebels but the street remains quiet.
“I always forget how messy that gets,” the alien mutters, flicking the bloody wing in a futile attempt to shake off some of the crimson fluid coating the feathers.
“Why don’t you have a blaster on you?” is the first thing Jerjerrod blurts, instead of any of the other likely more pertinent questions.
“Ditched as much weight as possible for speed since your detail said it was so dire,” the alien says, stepping casually over the twitching body still bleeding heavily from the slit throat. He leaves a trail of bloody boot prints as he approaches their cover. “Means no armor and no conventional blaster. The modified hold out I usually use for this got shot last week and the Empire won’t spring for a proper Denonian model. Figured it’d be easy enough to get a new blaster here, considering.”
Jerjerrod looks over the alien again. He notes the wingspan and shape. Approximates the man’s weight and height. Calculates for lift and thrust and drag. Considers the speeds he had seen him reach in a dive. Sensible. Well, excepting the fact that he came unarmed. He tells the man as much.
The lieutenant colonel blinks at him. “Who said anything about unarmed?” he asks as the first of his men thunder into the square.
The wings had disappeared in the interim but Jerjerrod isn’t quite sure how or when it happened. He looks almost human without them. And… familiar, though Jerjerrod can’t quite place his face.
“You had no blaster, sir,” the head of Jerjerrod’s security detail says dryly.
“I didn’t,” says the alien. Suddenly he has a wicked looking knife in his hand. “But I didn’t come unarmed either.”
He smirks at their surprise and suddenly Jerjerrod recognizes him.
It’s Veers.
The chap from the army recruitment posters.
Jerjerrod hadn’t known he was an alien.
—---------------------------------------------------------
Ah yes, there it is. The inevitable expression when they realize he is Denonian and Not Human. Near human. Human passing.
But with his wings out, when they’d just been wrapped around Senators Koh and Organa, it is unmistakable.
Koh scurries away from him, as if he would suddenly bite, as though they hadn’t spent the last hour in close quarters as Veers shielded him from blaster bolts.
Senator Organa, the princess of Alderaan, a small slip of a girl in a white gown, does not. Instead, she puts a hand to the sluggishly bleeding blaster wound that would have gone through her head if he hadn’t interposed his wing. “I didn’t know you were Denonian, Colonel,” she says softly.
“That’s by design, Senator,” he says, resisting the urge to twitch his wing away from her fingers. He’d been ordered to keep his wings in for the recruitment posters and without them visible, there is no other visual sign of what he is.
Human passing.
A phrase he’s heard from rebels like the Ryloth freedom fighters or the pantorans. Even from his own son once. Implying that he has a privilege in the Empire because no one can tell what he is if he’s careful.
As though the medics don’t sneer when he tells them that his heart rate is quite healthy actually or his wings don’t ache in their sheaths every day because he has no way to keep them out when all the armor and uniforms are cut for humans and not him.
As though this sort of treatment is unique to the Empire, isn’t something that existed in the Republic. As though any human medic he’d been treated by in the Clone Wars hadn’t seen the differences in his bone structure when they scanned him and then looked at him and thought alien. Separatist.
—------------------------------------------------------------
Veers is warm. And heavy.
Not quite as heavy as a normal man, even with the extra weight of his wings, but so much better than a weighted blanket. He’s perhaps 175 pounds with them unsheathed.
But with his wings spread out to their full length over the width of the bed, it feels almost as though Thrawn is in the middle of a proper chiss sleeping pile.
It’s absolutely worth the occasional mouthful of feathers and the incorrect rumor about them being lovers that enters the circulation of scuttlebutt on the Thunderwasp.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------
Thrawn rubs his fingers through his friend’s hair, listening to Veers make content chirps at the platonic grooming.
It takes him a few hours to realize that Thrawn himself is purring.
—----------------------------------------------------------
“I miss the flight tubes,” Veers says. His foot bounces as he stares at the elevator doors.
“Flight tubes?” Covell asks, glancing at the colonel.
“Tunnels built into the ship, for faster transportation. They were especially convenient for moving between different levels quickly,” says Veers. His foot bounces faster. “These elevators are so slow.”
“The Thunderwasp is actually pretty fast, when it comes to elevator speed,” Covell points out.
“They’re slow.”
“That’s for safety, sir,” Covell says.
Veers sighs. His foot is still bouncing.
—---------------------------------------------------------------
There is a vulnerability to wings. A dangerous sensitivity.
So when Veers is captured on Zaloriis, he is intensely glad that his wings are sheathed before he is stunned. He forgets that there are ways to force a Denonian to bring out their wings.
They drag him to the roof and fling him off. His wings unfurl. Of course they do. It's three stories up and his bones are sturdier than human but they aren't that sturdy.
The motion to bring his wings out is instinctual, like the urge that has you catch yourself with your hands when you trip. They unfold and Veers dives for the ground outside the rebel base, as fast as he can manage. He's inches from the ground, is already twisting so he can land. But his twenty seven foot wingspan makes him a bigger target and Veers has to spread them fully from his body to make sure he can slow down enough to get his legs in front of him. The stun shot hits him right as his foot touches the ground.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most imperial commanders won’t waste the effort to rescue an alien colonel. Thrawn is not most commanders.
He stalks through the halls of Zaloriis’s rebel base. His shots tear through the separatists and rebels as he advances. And then he opens the door at the end of the hall, the one with a single tawny feather at the base.
Veers is sprawled on the floor, massive wings chained down. Thrawn has seen these wings before. Had studied the ink designs dyed onto the feathers. Had helped preen them more than a few times. Thrawn had bandaged them a time or two, in the past, when Veers hadn’t wanted to risk a particularly bigoted medic. Had even, once, been allowed to help with the re-dyeing process.
Thrawn has never seen them this bad.
Both of his bladed primaries are gone, as are large portions of his flight feathers. There is a ragged gap where the proudly inked imperial cog had been. He's missing other handfuls worth of feathers in various other places. Most of the damage is to the right wing, but the left is broken, though whether that had been intentional or a byproduct of Veers beating it instinctually against the floor in an attempt to get free when they'd started in on the other limb is unclear.
Blood and powder down mix on the floor, creating an awful pink slush. It will never come out of Thrawn's uniform but he's far more concerned with the way Veers's eyes don't focus on him. Drugged, judging by the pupils. Possibly also shock.
Thrawn reaches out to attempt to start splinting the broken wing and it twitches beneath his hand, rattling the chains.
The general's wings are not his face.
He has far less control of them.
And that. That was a flinch.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thrawn is pacing the hallway outside the surgery room Veers has been wheeled into. He had managed to get that far by virtue of being able to keep Veers calm through them holding his wings in to get them through the hallway.
Denonian wings tended to be all or nothing. You could not sheathe only one. They were either both out or both in.
And they would be both out for a while, given that the broken one would need to be splinted. Straight out, even, which would make navigating ISD corridors difficult. That would need to be accommodated for.
Further contemplation is interrupted by a hoarse scream from inside the surgery room. It’s somewhere between the avian sounds of proper Denese and the raw sound of a man who had been tortured for a week and a half. Loud crashes and the subsequent swearing is loud enough to be heard through the durasteel walls.
Thrawn overrides the lock on the surgical area and enters.
The space is not meant for a Denonian wingspan. The fifteen foot width of the area assumes room for the surgical team and equipment. The medical team had attempted to solve this issue by binding down the less injured limb with leather straps. This, combined with the black bag that for some reason covered the colonel’s head, had caused Veers to panic.
The broken wing knocks a tray of surgical equipment over. Veers scrabbles at the bag with dislocated fingers, trying to drag it off his head.
Medical staff are trying to subdue both wings and wrestle the colonel back onto the table. It’s not helping matters.
“Enough.”
All motion stills but for the rapid heaving of Veers’s chest. Thrawn pulls the hands away from Veers’s shoulders. And if he’s a little rougher with the man who has a hand gripped tight on each of the joints where the wings connect to the torso, it’s worth it for the way a large measure of the tension vanishes from Veers’s spine and the tail feathers on the bottoms of his calves relax from their fanned position.
Thrawn eases the bag off of Veers’s head. The colonel sways forward into him, making a relieved clicking sound in greeting. The ruffled feathers in his wings slowly lower.
“The bag.” It’s a coldly furious demand for explanation and everyone in the room knows it.
“He’s got a lot of drugs in him and we haven’t worked on a Denonian before,” the lead surgeon says defiantly.
“You have never worked on a Chiss before me and yet you have never put a bag over my head,” Thrawn says. The surgeon quails under his glare.
“It’s supposed to work on birds,” one of the doctors says defensively.
“It is supposed to work on birds,” Thrawn repeats quietly and watches the man flinch. “What about on sentients? Would you feel particularly reassured if you had just been held by enemy combatants for a week and then be limited in your vision by a bag over your head?”
There’s a round of silent headshakes.
“What if you had a limb bound just after being tied to the ground by that same one a few hours ago?”
A round of flinches.
“And did not one of you think to at least call a Denonian surgeon or someone trained to work on them for a consultation?”
Silence.
“You will call one now.”
“Yes sir. You should-”
“Stay for the rest of this procedure. Since you seem incapable of doing it capably or humanely without supervision.”
—--------------------------------------------------------
It takes three hours for the medics to finish working on Veers’ wings, and they are the longest three hours of Thrawn’s life. His friend clings desperately to his hand, an anchor of familiarity amidst what has to be excruciatingly painful injuries that the Chimaera’s staff are simply not equipped to deal with.
Over and over again, Thrawn has watched the hologram of the Denonian surgeon hold his face in his hands as the Chimaera’s expert tells him they don’t have a bacta tank large enough to accommodate Veers’ wings, that they’ve never needed to secure bandages without adhesives before, and a dozen other tiny reminders that this is not a place for aliens. Veers lets out a soft whimper and the hologram sighs again, explaining that the bone structure of a wing is not analogous to that of a human arm, and dislocated joints must be handled in a certain way.
“Umm sorry to interrupt, but how high of a heart rate is too high?” One of the techs asks suddenly, and Thrawn feels the anger burn a little brighter within him. It is one thing to deactivate the alarms on the medical droids during routine examinations of non-human patients, but it is another to not have them programmed properly for this kind of procedure - especially since he had commed ahead to give the team time to prepare. It spoke to incompetence across the board, and Thrawn would have to ensure it did not happen again… but Veers needed to survive first.
“Anything over 200,” the holographic doctor responds. “Give or take. He probably needs a transfusion.”
“We haven’t been able to cross-match with any of the synthetics we have in stock, and it will take time to synthesize Denonian cells…”
“What about mine?” Thrawn asks, glancing down at his friend’s pale features again. “Did you do a cross-match with mine?”
“We keep yours in storage in case there are issues, sir, we can’t just-“
“I am not bleeding out on your operating table, Doctor. We can address the deficiencies in your blood bank later,” Thrawn says evenly, already planning a full review of the entire medical staff and procedures. “If my blood will assist Colonel Veers, you should give it to him.”
“There’s no way-“
“Actually,” a new voice chimes in, frantically waving a datapad, “if we use your plasma, we might be able to come up with an alternative with the synth-RBCs. It’s not ideal for a long term solution, but it should be good enough for now.”
“Do you require a fresh donation?” Thrawn asks the newcomer directly.
“No, we should have it in storage. I’ll get it prepared.”
Thrawn nods, tightening his grip on Veers’ hand again. “Be strong, Maximilian. You can overcome this.”
—---------------------------------------------------------------
“Can I help you?” Doctor Annika Wilhelmm asks, taking in the appearance of the newcomers in her office. They are both military men, one of whom is startlingly blue, and they both have grim expressions on their faces.
“Doctor Wilhelmm,” the blue one says, “you have extensive experience in rehabilitation of wing injuries in Denonians, do you not?”
Annika narrows her eyes suspiciously. The last time she had discussed her heritage and unique perspective on non-humans in the Empire, she had found herself on the next shuttle to this backwater station in the other rim, forced to play physician for the pretentious officers who never saw battle and preferred to spend their time on trivial vices. The records weren’t sealed - despite her requests - but there were scant few reasons why anyone would bother to dig them up.
“What’s your interest?” She says, eyeing them both. The blue one is obviously an alien, and the shorter one was likely human - he didn’t carry himself like a Denonian - which only made her more suspicious.
The blue one taps a couple of things on a datapad before sliding it across the table, and Annika has to resist the urge to gasp. The image of torn and broken feathers, soaked in blood along the ragged edge of a wing is by far one of the worst injuries she’s ever seen, and she finds herself wondering what could have inflicted such a horror. The human reaches out, flicking to the image scan of a wing, showing a painful-looking fracture in both the radius and the ulna, and Annika feels a pang of sympathy for whoever owns the tawny-feathered wings.
“What happened?” She asks, handing the datapad back.
The two men exchange a glance.
“Can you help him?” The human asks, a worried note to his voice.
“Maybe,” she replies. “What happened?”
The blue one considers her, his red eyes burning into her as he thinks.“He was captured by enemy forces, and my physicians have proven woefully inadequate for the task of healing him. I am hoping you can do better.”
“Why?” She asks, watching them both. “Why do you care about him?”
“He serves on my ship,” the blue one says, “and so it is my responsibility to ensure he is well.”
“And…” he adds after a moment. “He is my friend.”
“I can’t make any promises,” Wilhelmm says after a moment. “But I will try. For your friend.”
—---------------------------------------------------------------
“The imping procedure will be the easiest part of your recovery. Your file indicates you’ve done it before?” Wilhelmm asks, tapping at her datapad.
“Not since the Clone Wars,” Veers says. His expression turns slightly sheepish. “I don’t keep a stock of my molt feathers anymore.”
“That won’t be an issue,” she says, waving the worry away. “Your sister donated. And the needle is handmade from bamboo, none of that new fangled fiberglass.”
“That’s good,” Veers sighs.
“You’ll be under anesthesia. I’ll snip the damaged feather, attach the donor with a bit of bamboo, add a bit of epoxy, and join the pieces. And your friend will be with me the whole time.” She gives him a reassuring smile. Her foot swings lightly above the ground in a show of nonverbal ease. “We’ll have that bit sorted as soon as possible.”
Veers can feel his ruffled feathers smoothing back down. “Thank you.”
—----------------------------------------------------------
The first time Piett sees his friend’s wings, he blurts, “Can I touch them?” without thinking. The tawny feathers are large and soft looking and so very tempting.
Veers looks away, flushing a little. He shifts slightly in his chair, hands tightening on his datapad. But one of his wings presses into Piett’s palm, almost of its own accord. “Be careful of the bladed primary,” Veers says.
The feathers are soft and smooth under his fingers as Piett strokes down the wing. It tremors under his hand a little and Piett almost pulls away. Almost. But Veers has his eyes closed and a small smile on his face and is chirping lightly.
“They’re lovely,” Piett murmurs, running his hands back up. There’s something about this quiet moment. Something deeper than this simple touch seems to merit.
"Wait until they're healed enough for me to get them re-inked," Veers murmurs, his wing pressing a little more firmly against Piett’s hand.
Piett’s fingers still for a moment. Veers makes a sad sound and presses into him a little more until Piett resumes the gentle pets. Piett wants to ask. Wants to make sure he’s not hurting his friend, wants to know what happened, wants to know that the situation was dealt with.
But Veers is calm and peaceful and enjoying himself and Piett won’t ruin that by asking. There are always other days, if Veers wants him to know.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------
“The lights are horrid,” Thrawn grumbles, massaging at his temples. Veers passes him a hypo of painkillers which he takes with a grateful expression. “Must they be so bright?”
Veers sticks his head further out over the balcony’s edge. He inhales the clean air of Naboo. “What I want to know is why they wear so much karking perfume. And strong. I thought I was going to pass out, I got so dizzy.”
“Humans,” Thrawn mutters with disgust.
Veers’s cackling, chattering and birdlike, echoes in the Naboo night.
—----------------------------------------------------
Piett discovers very rapidly in his friendship with one Tiaan Jerjerrod that the man deeply enjoys providing for his friends. In influence, connections, clothes, fine foods, and high end luxuries of the hedonistic variety. Soaps and shampoos and cologne and, on one extremely memorable occasion, scented lube.
It is rare however, that his attempts go quite so far awry.
The case of what to get one Maximilian Veers happens to be one such incident. Or rather, series of incidents.
The first time, it is a bottle of specially made feather oil, designed to aid in waterproofing, hold dye onto the wings for longer, and give them a glossy finish. Veers has to sit down and explain to Jerjerrod that while 70% of Denonians have preening glands, his wings use powder down and thus he does not waterproof his feathers with oil. That conversation devolves into the prioritization of research for glanded wings in both general grooming products and actual medical practice.
(The highlight of the conversation is when, in a response to why off worlders only know about the oil wings from Jerjerrod, Veers had said dryly “the oil glands are a better seller for porn, I imagine.”)
(Jerjerrod had gone beat red and choked on his drink.)
(Though, after Motti’s resulting ire had been soothed, Piett ends up needing to talk Jerjerrod down from actually funding a research group to determine the best grooming products for Denonians with powder down wing types.)
The second time is an ill fated attempt at pronouncing Veers’s name the proper Denonian way.
Third, Jerjerrod tries to get him a variety of blankets. They are warm and fuzzy and slightly heavy and Veers drags them off to his room immediately. However, a penchant for warm, heavy blankets is a Veers thing and not a Denonian thing.
(“You know he doesn’t nest, right?” Piett teases later, when he catches Jerjerrod shopping for more blankets.)
(The crestfallen expression he gets in response says that Jerjerrod very much did not know.)
The fourth attempt is a beautiful gold and ruby preening comb. Piett’s own gift of a fairly lopsided hand carved tool seems almost meager in comparison. Or, it does until Veers insists on using it with far greater frequency than Jerjerrod’s gift, which gathered dust on his dresser on the justification that it “felt like a clanker” and was “cold and unfriendly”. Arguments that Covell’s preening tool, also used with fair frequency, is also made of metal, are unheeded. Questions seeking clarity rarely get more understandable answers.
(Covell evaluates Jerjerrod for a long moment when Piett’s friend starts asking him questions out of desperation. Then he leads them to a hanger bay that had been marked as booked for training.)
(Unless napping counts as training though, Piett isn’t sure much is actually being done. Veers sleeps on his stomach, sprawled out over a set of sparring mats clearly pilfered from the gym. Thrawn kneels at the edge of one of Veers’s massive wings, carefully preening the russet feathers along the top.)
(Covell, though, stops in the doorway, looking as though someone had proven to him that the emperor was secretly three jawas in a trench coat.)
(Then he shakes it off, sits them down on the edge of the mats, and begins giving a comprehensive lecture about why the comb had been a bad idea, throwing around phrases like “psychic imprints” and “scapulars”.
Thrawn occasionally adds in comments about “localized empathetic reading capabilities in the wing” and “mechanisms appearing to be rather similar to the kiffar psychometry”.)
The fifth attempt is, what looks like to Piett, the exact same comb. Veers eyes it with mild disappointment that Jerjerrod doesn’t seem to notice, clearly thinking the same thing. But, to get the gift giving over with, he sits on the provided stool and unfurls his wings to let Jerjerrod preen him.
At the first touch of the comb, his feathers fluff outward abruptly. Jerjerrod, clearly remembering the lecture on agitated behaviors and how he was supposed to back off immediately if he sparks one from Covell, takes three quick steps away. There’s panic and disappointment and shame building in his face already.
But before it can get far, Veers is twisting, flinging himself off the stool, and wrapping his arms and wings around Jerjerrod.
(Piett hears Veers quietly murmuring thanks and backs out of the room.)
(He finds out later that it is merely a replica of the comb, meticulously recreated by hand by Jerjerrod after extensive and expensive lessons from a jeweler.)
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Wait,” Jerjerrod says at the tail end of a discussion with Covell about wing sheaths and the problems the current uniform designs cause for Veers, “How do the wing sheaths work? It’s not as though he has the space to tuck them into his body and you can’t just vanish mass!”
Covell sighs. “I asked him about that once,” he says. “The colonel said something about interdimensional wing pockets. When I asked how that worked, he just shrugged and said he wasn’t a quantum biologist.”
“A quantum biologist?” Jerjerrod questions delicately.
“I have no fucking clue and a lot more questions.”
—---------------------------------------------------------
Veers is forever grateful to Thrawn for outfitting his office with a projector. The holoterminals of the Empire were not constructed with the eyesight of someone who can see seven times further than most humans in mind.
He has reading glasses, of course.
But being able to project his work on the wall of his office and read without them is wonderful.
—------------------------------------------------------------
Covell mutters, “This is so dumb.”
Thrawn and Vanto emerge from where they’d fallen after losing the latest bout of shoulder wars. On Covell’s own shoulders, Veers twists to peer at the other advancing teams. “The higher I am, the better I can see.”
“Max, you can fly-”
“Hush now, Freja, I am strategizing.”
—------------------------------------------------------------
Each step of his walkers shake the compound Thrawn is being held in. Veers knows that Thrawn is familiar with the feeling. Hopes he’s coherent enough to recognize it and know what that means. That Veers is here and he is willing to tear apart this entire damn mountside to get to him.
And he does, practically. Heavy fire tears into the stone, blasting open a hole in the wall of the compound.
It is generally a bad strategy for the commander of a walker unit to descend from his walker in the middle of a battle. Both because it makes him vulnerable and changes the command structure in the middle of a fight. This is slightly less of a bad idea with Veers, because the walker doesn’t have to make itself vulnerable to allow him out. He just jumps from the head in a move that makes all but the most seasoned of his men flinch.
It’s still not a great idea but Veers does it anyway.
It is not a good idea for an admiral to depart from their ship to storm a ground base. Thrawn had done it. There is no way that Veers will do any less for him.
Veers tears through the rebel forces with his blaster, men, and wings. Some of his troopers flinch back from him as he passes, blood not his own dripping from the feathers.
Keeping his wings out in an enclosed space like this is not something a Denonian does. The corridors are not wide enough for it. For flight or maneuvering. But Veers doesn’t put them away because if the men who know him look terrified, the kriffers who like helping this freak with his alien collection are practically pissing themselves.
Veers loathes the feeling of blood between his feathers under most circumstances. This is not one of them.
The stone walls abruptly have glass panels every few feet. He looks in the first one and is nearly sick. An emaciated looking twi’lek woman lies on the floor. Her purple skin has an alarming ashy pallor to it and she looks at him with a spice addict’s eyes.
“Fuck!” Veers snarls because they had known there would be others but not like this. He’s suddenly glad he’d fought about bringing as many specialist medics as cashing in his favor with Vader would let him. “Escort the medics in now. Two of you to each occupied cell. Do not touch without explicit permission. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes sir!”
And then he goes storming off down the hall, men peeling away to watch over a male Dathomirian Zabrak huddled in the corner of his cell. Falling into place beside the glass holding the shivering Kiffar who screamed soundlessly with his palm pressed to the floor. Guarding the drug dazed Zeltron who had clawed at the glass until her fingers bled.
By the time he gets to the end of the hall, the fifty six men he had started with had been whittled down to two.
And of course, Thrawn is in this last cell. He’s been stripped of his uniform and forced into the same orange cotton as all of the other prisoners. Something about the fabric has caused horrible violet hives to crawl up his pale blue skin.
He looks thinner, even though he’s only been missing for three days. The glow of his eyes is dim and dull. He shivers and if Veers strains, he can faintly hear the tiny self soothing purr his friend is emitting.
Veers has only ever heard it once before, when Thrawn had slipped up during the after Zaloriis procedures.
Veers wants so very desperately to kill something. Anything.
Thrawn is bigger than him, in the shoulders at least. He should not look so karking tiny.
One of the troopers, perhaps realizing that Veers is about two seconds from trying to launch himself through the glass, figures out how to retract the pane. Veers is through the gap as soon as he can fit the shoulders of his wings through it.
Thrawn cringes back from him, even though Veers hasn’t tried to touch him. Veers categorically does not like what that means, especially with the way his eyes don’t quite seem to see Veers, just his motion. Or the sluggishness of his movements. Or the bruises on his wrists.
Veers makes the tiny chirp that means “little hawk.” Denese is not really a language meant for pet names. Most are horrible amalgamations of other words like “safe-heart-keeper-person” or “swift-wind-heart-soars”. But Veers had started calling Thrawn little hawk when, after being told that Veers’s own wings were very similar to those of the Denonian warhawk, his friend had confessed to once being in command of a Chiss ship called the Springhawk.
Thrawn recognizes that sound. “Max?” he asks in a horrible small voice, reaching for him. He misses, clumsy and uncoordinated in ways he usually isn’t due to the drugs.
Pulling a loose feather from his wing, Veers puts it in Thrawn’s hand. His friend stares at it for a long moment before looking back at Veers.
Veers gently makes the “little hawk” chirp again.
And then Thrawn is lurching forward, sluggish and uncoordinated, to wrap himself around Veers as thoroughly as he can manage. Veers folds his wings around Thrawn, building a solid wall of feathers between him and the world. Then he starts in on the trilling lullaby he hasn’t sung since Zevulon was eight and decided that Veers didn’t sing it right anymore.
They sit like that til the medic comes.
And if the pantoran doesn’t take off their tinted glasses for the entirety of the examination, only speaks stilted Basic, and hands over a sheet of medical instructions that Veers will later have to get Vanto to translate because they’re written in Sy Bisti, Veers doesn’t mention it.
Nor does he acknowledge the fact that they aren’t among the collection of medics that meet him back at the lambda.
He’s far more concerned about the fact that Thrawn had been too far out of it to comment about how the lines of the pantoran’s gold facial paint were crooked, backwards, and heavily smudged. And supposed to be tattoos, not paint.
Though he does make a note to pass along Ba’kif’s wishes for speedy recovery and Ar’alani’s rather graphic threats to “hunt Veers down and disembowel him like a tundrahunter on an iceflier” if Thrawn doesn’t recover. Both sentiments seem like something his friend will benefit from hearing.
(Veers had been heavily assured by Ba’kif that the threat lost something in translation and that if Thrawn didn’t recover, the Chiss general would be happy to ensure that the Empire only ever found pieces of his body.)
(Veers side eyes the genially smiling Chiss.)
(Ar’alani had given him a very scary grin.)
—----------------------------------------------------------
“I heard you were kidnapped,” Admiral Konstantine says, pressing uncomfortably close into Thrawn’s space. It would have been uncomfortably close even before his kidnapping but now it is excruciating. Konstantine’s body heat is concentrated around his face and groin. It takes everything Thrawn has not to lean away. “That must have been distressing, Grand Admiral. If I had been there-“
This balcony is too secluded. Most of the ballroom can’t see him, most of the security can’t see him, it isn’t safe. But the ballroom is also too loud, too much right now and he can’t leave the gala yet, the emperor had specifically told him he had to stay for at least another hour. The balcony is the better of the two options.
At least Konstantine isn’t able to read his discomfort. The only person in the room who can is thoroughly occupied in conversation with Vader about updates for the AT-ATs and…
Apparently not standing with Darth Vader anymore. Had he truly been that distracted by this ridiculous unease that he hadn’t noticed? Konstantine isn’t even a threat, Thrawn is overreacting.
The flinch he makes, a tiny shoulder twitch, when Konstantine’s hand drops heavily on his arm is not recognizable as such to most humans. To Denonians, used to interpreting expression, mood, and occasionally language from a wing flick or minute feather shift, it is as loud as a scream.
“Back off,” Veers says, clipped and cold and dangerous.
“The admiral and I were having a conversation, Colonel,” Konstantine sniffs. “It doesn’t concern you.” His hand presses harder onto Thrawn’s shoulder. It’s resting directly over a fading bruise and it’s hard to keep a blank face at the memories that pressure invokes. Thrawn takes a stumbling step away, breaking the contact. The heat of Konstantine’s face darkens in response and he needs to get away. Then Konstantine is shifting, starting to follow him. And he can’t do this, he can’t handle this man touching right now, like he has a right-
The hiss Veers makes is furious and entirely avian, like a swan from one the lakes of Val Denn. And suddenly all Thrawn can see is a wall of bristling tawny and russet feathers. The bladed primaries are practically quivering with the desire to be used. A full threat display, with fanned tail and ruffled feathers. Probably the only thing that keeps the other admiral’s head on his shoulders is the restraining hand Thrawn gets on Veers.
It takes multiple shoulder pats for Veers to sheathe his wings again. The balcony is secluded but not that tucked away for all that and the last thing Veers needs is the reputation as an alien who threatens the human core elite.
When Thrawn can see the scene again, he finds Konstantine pressed up against the opposite railing. His face is pale and he trembles, clutching at it with white knuckles. Then he recovers the tattered shreds of his dignity, hissing “get your hunting hawk tamed, Thrawn. Before I have it done for you.”
“Well,” Veers says philosophically as they watch Konstantine stumble back into the gala, “at least he didn’t call me your pet.”
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Holocomm Text Channel ISD-CH to SSD-EX (connection established: 1020 2/23/19 AFE. connection secured: 1021 2/23/19 AFE. message receipt delay: 2 minutes.)
GrandADM.Thrawn: I have been informed that you have had Colonel Veers transferred to the Executor and thus, Death Squadron.
VADER: what of it
GrandADM.Thrawn: As you are aware, the colonel is a personal friend.
GrandADM.Thrawn: I will not see him harmed. Especially not through negligence.
GrandADM.Thrawn: If the following men are not on your ship by the time the colonel first sets foot on it, I will go to the emperor and have him override your transfer and have Veers returned to the Chimera.
GrandADM.Thrawn: [Document Attached: Necessary Officers For The Executor.hdf]
VADER: understood
—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pellaeon enters the conference room marked on his schedule and stops dead. The man seated at the table, while equally tall and imposing, is not Grand Admiral Thrawn. Colonel Veers watches him with dark, intent eyes and a cocked head.
Pellaeon is very clearly expected. He’s also fairly certain that the grand admiral isn’t going to show up. As he considers going for the door, Veers stands and steps around him with neat deliberate steps. His gaze is still fixed directly on Pellaeon.
He circles until he is planted directly between Pellaeon and the door, forcing him to step back if he doesn’t want to be in arms reach of this very dangerous man who doesn’t seem to like him very much. He watches Pellaeon in silence for another moment.
This, Pellaeon realizes, is an evaluation. Veers is looking for something, staring as though he can dig into Pellaeon’s soul and pull out all his secrets.
He is making Pellaeon feel distinctly like a small mammal before a hawk.
But if Veers means to intimidate him away, he will not succeed.
As the silence stretches, Pellaeon makes no move to speak first. He sets his shoulders, falls into parade rest, and meets the intimidating stare dead on, doing his best to portray that he will not allow himself to be pushed around.
At last, Veers says, “I’m sure you’re wondering why we’re here, captain.”
“I’m sure I’m wondering if Thrawn knows you’ve been forging meetings in his name with his code cylinders,” Pelleaon says back sharply, irritated with the whole charade. “And if you try to give me some trite threat as a reason that I shouldn’t tell him-” He makes to push past Veers.
The colonel rolls his shoulders as Pellaeon approaches. He braces himself for a fight but instead a pair of great big wings unfurl. They stretch and flex, opening to their full length. The tips touch the walls on either side of the room. They also fully block the exit.
Veers is staring again. He’s watching Pellaeon for a reaction. For shock or disgust. For horror.
This had been a strategy. A set up to see how Pellaeon reacted to an alien before he got to meet Thrawn. A protective barrier between Thrawn, though possibly not one he knew about, and a potentially xenophobic subordinate in a position where he could make the grand admiral’s life very difficult if he wanted. And Pellaeon is very sure that if he proved to be that kind of subordinate, if he failed this evaluation of his character, he’d be very summarily removed from the Chimera.
Possibly via the airlock.
Pellaeon had been wrong.
He’s not watching Pellaeon like an aggressor. Veers watches him like he’s a potential threat and Pellaeon remembers the rumors that Thrawn had recently been kidnapped by some crazy sadist with an alien fetish with an abrupt shock of horror.
The rumors had said that Veers had been the one to rescue the grand admiral.
“Let’s talk,” Veers says darkly.
(He walks out three hours later with the feeling that he has been tentatively approved of.)
(And then he meets a man with a wild space accent who gives him a mild smile, a thorough summation of his career history, and a terrifyingly ruthless interrogation disguised as urbane small talk that would make any ISB agent proud. Or envious.)
(That conversation is a little shorter. Only an hour before the man departs with a polite nod.)
(There isn’t a single veiled threat in that talk, but somehow, it was more terrifying than the entire ordeal with Veers.)
(But as Eli Vanto disappears around the corner, tapping at the datapad in his hands, the glances of the crew seem much friendlier.)
(His approval had been cemented, then.)
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximilian Veers is making his way to the conference room for the debriefing for his last campaign.
Vader had swept off immediately after the ships had landed on the Exectuor, leaving Veers to handle the aftermath of the campaign, as usual. His cape had hung oddly as he left but Veers quickly forgot it when one of his division captains handed him a datapad of initial casualty numbers.
And then Veers had gotten involved in the clean up, barking orders and giving instructions. He’d overseen the storing of the walkers and the medics transferring their patients. Sent notes to the walker technicians and jotted down the name of a particularly enterprising Lieutenant for possible promotion. It had taken a very long time to get the chaos of a post-battle return to die down into something more orderly. He’s still got dust on his boots and cuirass but he also doesn’t have time to change. Theoretically he could be late, it’s his own meeting after all, but that’s a slippery slope to allow himself and he tries to set a good example for his officers.
Piett loves his ship but kark is it a monster to traverse sometimes.
A little time can be shaved off if he takes the less used pathways. If he goes up two decks and cuts across…
Veers nearly misses the familiar rasp of Vader’s breathing as he rounds the corner. He stills. His boot is resting on an armorweave cape, shed from its owner’s shoulders. A large black form leans against the wall, a cloud of tools hovering around it and attempting to repair a horrible gash in the armor. No. The damage to prosthetic beneath the iconic suit. Vader’s gleaming helmet turns to observe him.
Veers is not Thrawn. Despite Vader appreciating his skill on Batuu and Mokjev and despite the excellent conversations they’ve had about his walkers, Veers does not have the same sort of odd leeway with the sith lord that his friend possesses. Certainly not enough for this.
The air becomes oppressive, pressing down on him from all angles. A pressure forms at his throat but he doesn’t know if it’s his mind or actually Lord Vader. His wings itch in his sheaths and he wants to unfold them and shake the irritation away but he’s worried that if he does, the delicate bones would be crushed by the horrible force pressing in from all sides. His shoulders roll instinctively through the release motion but he manages to prevent them from unsheathing at the last moment. The intent focus on him tracks the motion, the weight of Vader’s attention becomes even more literally crushing. Veers knows that his knees are on the verge of buckling.
In the second before the force actively drives Veers to the floor, Vader’s left arm, torn open to expose the wires, spasms and sparks.
The malice breaks, Vader’s attention diverted. Veers straightens but doesn’t move further. He knows Vader is still aware of his presence. The proper thing to do would be to leave. The smart thing. Give Vader his space and pretend he hadn’t seen anything.
But Veers keeps thinking about Thrawn. About the first time they’d met. The horrible vulnerability of someone finding you while you’re hurting. Trying to take care of things alone because there’s no one to ask. There aren’t any medical bays in this part of the ship. Veers knows because of the time when Piett had been attacked by a group of Core bigots and he had needed to drag Piett from a few corridors over to the Herd’s medics because they were closer.
Vader’s specific doctors and surgeons are even further away.
And Veers has heard… well. He’s heard things about Doctor Katrox from one of his former colonels before their retirement.
They aren’t quite the same things that he remembers going through with the Chimera’s medical crew. But they aren’t as different as they should be, either.
Veers comes to a decision. A possibly stupid decision. But one he intends to go through with.
“My Lord?” He asks, doing his best to project his usual stoic professionalism. “I am not a prosthetist or a cybernetics expert but I do know something about engineering and that looks to be in a difficult spot to repair. May I assist you?”
Vader stares. His respirator cycles. Veers stands perfectly still, hands locked behind his back. This time, as he runs through the memory of Thrawn and him meeting for the first time, it almost feels as though someone is watching it with him.
A scanner floats to his hand and Vader turns away.
Veers sends a quick message to Covell to keep the corridor clear and to tell him that he’ll be missing the debriefing, without explaining why. He knows his friend will think it’s a wing issue and Veers will have to at least partially explain later, but he doesn’t now.
The scanner is still floating in front of his face. Veers takes it.
(They sit on the floor.)
(He sits there with Vader for the next several hours.)
(Veers picks through the wreckage of the limb, commenting on what he sees and diligently following the directions he receives in response.)
(And when Veers is done, Vader sweeps off.)
(That’s fine. Veers hadn’t expected anything else.)
(It’s probably why he’s utterly blindsided two weeks later when Covell bursts into his office waving around a datapad and shouting about modifications to the uniform code.)
(Veers hadn’t even realized that Vader had been listening when he had slipped into rambling about the discomforts of the current design.)
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Veers pauses again, trying to remember the word in Denese. Zev doesn’t like it when he switches back to Basic in these calls and there isn’t a quiet sound that properly conveys the idea of “please call me more often”.
Of course, Veers has paused once too often for this one conversation to Zevulon’s mind and that also pisses off his son. “You can’t even speak our language properly anymore!” Zev says, his voice an aggressive hiss. His wings flick sharply in annoyance. “Can’t you see what they’re doing to you?”
Veers doesn’t know the words in either language to explain that he’d started restricting himself to chitters and chirps during the Clone Wars, when the Republic had forced them into ships not built for their bodies or voices. Instead he says, “Tell me how any New Republic the rebels make will be different.The old republic was just as human centered as the Empire and the commanders of the rebellion are all human but one or two. There will never be ship corridors wide enough for us but there is a government currently in place that’s more effective than that bloated, corrupt, dying system had been in centuries.”
“We can try to fix it! The Rebuplic-”
“The republic refused to let us modify our armor for wings,” Veers says flatly. “Lord Vader had Imperial military code specifically modified so I can have slits in the uniform, armor, and boots for my wings and tail feathers."
It’s the rebels who tortured me, he wants to say. It’s the rebels who outed me.
He does not. But Force, does he want to.
—------------------------------------------------------------------
Zevulon has spent the entirety of his life knowing he is only half Denonian. Partly “near human” but not human enough for the Empire.
(Not Denonian enough for his father’s people, either.)
But just human enough that his throat can’t produce all the sounds his father can. His syrinx is too stiff.
And it’s infuriating, to watch his father carve away so much of his own language to cater to the Empire, in light of that.
—-------------------------------------------------------------------
“Did he just call me your mistress or imply that you were mine?” Veers asks, staring after Grand Admiral Tingellus.
“These rumors about our association have gotten rather ridiculous,” Thrawn says. Then, slyly, eyes glittering with the sort of mischief that makes Vanto sigh, he continues, “The next gala of this fete week has a mandatory plus one policy.”
Veers had not, in fact, known that. “They’re aware I’m a widower, right?”
“It’s Moff Jantyne,” Thrawn says dryly. “I doubt it.”
“Kark,” Veers sighs, resisting the urge to scrub a hand over his face in the middle of this swarm of sharks.
“We could go together,” Thrawn suggests. As though that wouldn’t make the rumors a thousand times worse. As though that sort of thing wouldn’t upend the betting books of the Chimera and the Herd a million times over.
Veers eyes him. The last time Veers had gone along with one of these sorts of ideas he had wound up in a drunk tank with Thrawn three planets over, sporting a new tattoo.
“As friends,” Thrawn clarifies, as though Veers had any doubt about that part. He hadn’t. Thrawn is very happily kriffing Pellaeon and Veers has no idea why he’s suggesting something that would publicly make it look anyway else.
“Would anyone else know we were going as friends?” Veers asks suspiciously.
Thrawn’s lip twitches. That’s as good as maniacal cackling.
“A no, then,” Veers says. And then a thought occurs. “Does Pellaeon know we’re going as friends?”
“I will tell him,” Thrawn says easily. Listening to that same easy confidence is what had gotten Veers into the Tattoo Incident to begin with. He’s not sure he can bear the humiliation of Covell coming to bail them out again.
Then again, Veers clearly hadn’t learned from the Tattoo Incident. His curiosity gets the best of him after a few moments of silence. As Thrawn knew it would, the bastard. “What exactly would be the plan here?”
Thrawn explains. Veers… probably gives the idea a lot more consideration than is wise.
“My father would roll in his grave,” Veers says at last. Thrawn gives him a raised eyebrow in response. That eloquent one that asks if something Veers has just raised as a concern is an undesired result. Which. No. Not necessarily.
“Okay,” Veers says in acknowledgement. “But why a dress?”
“Mistress is a rather feminine term in Basic and…”
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are moments, especially when one is sitting in an officer’s lounge with one’s superior officers, especially if one of those superior officers is Thrawn, when you overhear conversations that you absolutely don’t want to. This, Pellaeon is pretty sure, is definitely one of those moments.
Lieutenant Tahl, the bartender on duty, seems to agree. At least if the way that his eyes have closed in pain and the shaker in his hands stills are any indication.
“Okay,” Veers says, his cheeks slightly flushed from alcohol, “but clearly I’m the mistress. Since you’re higher ranked.” He leans more of his weight onto the elbow planted on the smooth wood of the bar. Thrawn sits between Veers and Pellaeon, nursing his cocktail. Thus he is thankfully the one in danger of being splashed by the general’s emphatic gesturing with his whiskey. “Or is Pellaeon the mistress, if you’ve known me longer?”
Veers and Thrawn aren’t dating. Pellaeon knows they aren’t dating because Thrawn had sat him down for a talk with Veers after Pellaeon had snapped something about not wanting to be part of cheating. So why the utter kark is Veers calling himself and/or Pellaeon Thrawn’s mistress?
“But I am in an official relationship with Gilad, and not you,” Thrawn says gravely. And there goes any hope of having this conversation turn sensible again tonight. “Thus would you not be the mistress?”
How much had they been drinking before Pellaeon had gotten here? Thrawn and Veers both have inhuman alcohol tolerances but even so, the number of glasses beside them is alarming. Especially since he’d seen both have at least one flute of champagne at the gala tonight. At least Veers had eaten his way through one of the bowls of bar nuts. He’s not sure that Thrawn’s had any food at all. Those little hors d'oeuvres at the party most certainly didn’t count.
He flags down the bartender to ask for the jerky strips Lieutenant Tahl kept for Thrawn and misses the next couple minutes of conversation.
His attention is abruptly yanked back to it when Thrawn makes the alarming statement, “My legs would look better in this dress, Maximilian, do not argue with me.”
Veers makes a rather rude clicking sound in response as Pellaeon whirls around. The bartender, he can see from the corner of his eye, is staring. His lover and his lover’s friend are hunched over Thrawn’s personal datapad, shoulders knocking as they jab at the screen.
“My shoulders are not too broad,” Thrawn says derisively in response. “Gilad likes my shoulders-”
Pellaeon makes a strangled sound, choking on his tongue. The bartender helpfully thumps his back.
Veers ignores him. Instead, he says, “Not too broad in general, too broad for this dress.”
Thrawn humphs. Veers stares at him. Thrawn goes back to apparently swiping through a gown catalog. And gives Veers a presumably vulgar chiss hand sign at the triumphant little chirp he receives for his nonverbal admission. Though when Pellaeon asks what they need the dress for, he gets that dreaded face of mischief from Thrawn and a baffled blink from Veers.
They do not explain. But they do keep arguing.
In the first hour, Lieutenant Tahl makes Pellaeon one of his infamous bloody marys in commiseration.
After the second hour, Pellaeon buries his head in his arms on the countertop. Thrawn pats absently at his shoulder. Pellaeon would be a lot more comforted if Thrawn and Veers would stop using the term mistress.
The bartender starts taking shots with him everytime they say the word dress somewhere toward the end of the third. Lieutenant Tahl’s hair has fallen out of it’s pommade in that time, somehow. His silver hoop earrings glitter as he matches Pellaeon shot for shot. Pellaeon’s pretty sure the only reason the kid doesn’t look as flushed as Veers is because it doesn’t show on his cool brown skin.
In the middle of the fourth, Pellaeon is dancing the verge between tipsy and flat out drunk. Perhaps that’s why he says “Why don’t you both just wear a dress?”
He may have forgotten to ask a few important questions before voicing this, including why and where.
It’s an oversight he regrets immediately when Thrawn’s head whips around to look at him as though he has made an excellent strategic point on the bridge. His eyes glow with delight. Veers looks frighteningly contemplative.
“That could work,” Veers says, pulling out his comm. He starts vigorously texting someone. Thrawn pulls it out of his hand to add apparently vital additional information. Veers does nothing to stop or protest this theft beyond a mildly irritated caw.
“Gilad is very wise,” Thrawn says to Veers, his deep baritone taking a confidential tone that’s made ridiculous by the fact that he’s not whispering. “It is why I keep him.”
Veers cocks his head. He stares at Thrawn. He looks back at Pellaeon. The sentence that is about to come out of his mouth is clearly going to be the epitome of drunk logic and Pellaeon dreads it.
He is still not prepared for when Veers eventually says, “I thought that was because you were fucking.”
It’s the Tahl’s turn to choke, having made the mistake of lifting his glass to his lips at that exact moment. Pellaeon is very abruptly glad that it is basically two in the morning and the bartender is the only other person there besides Veers and Thrawn. And that Tahl’s the bartender who caught Pellaeon and Thrawn making out once.
Slowly both Pellaeon and the Tahl turn to look at Thrawn. Perhaps he’ll keep his mouth shut. Maybe he’ll enumerate Pellaeon’s good qualities. Perhaps he’ll do something that will salvage this situation, like telling Veers to sleep off the alcohol.
Thrawn does none of these things.
“That too,” he agrees.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It had been a relief to meet Eli Vanto, really. A relief to have another person to speak with at these fancy Core parties who hadn’t grown up with the culture and found them utterly baffling. Who understood how utterly frustrating it is to be told that he had “such a quaint accent”.
Vanto is standing so that he has one eye on Pellaeon and one eye toward the door that Thrawn was supposed to have entered through five minutes ago. Piett would tease him about counting his charges repeatedly except that he also has an eye on how much Ozzel is drinking and is tracking his two new lieutenants as they moved through the crowd to ensure that they didn’t disgrace the Executor.
Despite that, they manage to have an engaging conversation about Outer Rim and Wild Space economics. Piett may not be nearly as conversant on the subject as Vanto or Motti, but it’s remarkably pleasant to not need to repeatedly reassure his conversational partner that the D’Astren system at least, no longer relied on the barter system. Or try not to react rashly to the implication that rim world economies would improve if their constituents stopped wasting their credits on spice and worked their way out of poverty with appropriate skill and vigor.
Vanto is nodding along as Piett says, “Grain based flours are generally imported on Axxila, given the poor quality of soil and lack of sunlight. They tend to be more expensive because of it and the lower levels tend to use the local…” And then Piett trails off, attention caught by the way that Pellaeon had violently choked on his drink. Pellaeon remains red even after he stops coughing, his eyes wide and mouth gaping. He looks like a man struck dumb.
Vanto tracks Pelleaon’s gaze. Whatever the captain is looking at is behind Piett. He’s not inclined to look, at least not until he hears Vanto mutter “Force fucking damn it, Thrawn.”
Then he turns.
The first thing he sees is Thrawn. He’s wearing full white skirts, the kind that need multiple layers of fabric to support the shape. The cloth is the exact same shade as his grand admiral’s uniform. A high collar trimmed in red closes with gold buttons. His sleeves are slightly puffed at the shoulder but close tight around his wrists. The grand admiral is even wearing makeup, bold red and gold eyeliner that traces out across his face in alien shapes.
Then he notices the strong hand tucked into the crook of Thrawn’s arm. Muscular arms, bare and traced with old scars. Solid, broad shoulders, also bare. A halter with a high collar. Heels and a skirt that ends at the knee in the exact shade of an army officer’s dress uniform. Vanto nudges him hard in the shoulder and Piett realizes he’s staring. But dear kriffing Force, how could he not be?
And then he processes exactly who is wearing the dress.
Oh no.
Oh no.
Piett flushes. Veers doesn’t notice but Thrawn absolutely does. He draws Veers to the dance floor and Veers spins neatly into frame when Thrawn twirls him. Thrawn’s blue hand sits squarely in the small of the general’s back. His bare back, because the dress is backless. The karking dress is backless and showing off the thick ridges of skin that he knows are where Veers hides his wings and the strong muscle there.
And then the band strikes up a tango. Veers may not be as traditionally graceful as the ladies spinning around him and Thrawn but he moves with a warrior’s lethal fluidity through the flicks and sweeps and turns.
“You’re drooling,” Vanto says dryly from beside him.
Piett can’t even think of a response to that, because Thrawn’s lifted Veers straight off the ground. Veers hooks both of his legs over Thrawn’s thigh and gets an arm around Thrawn’s neck. He sits like that for a moment. His skirt has ridden back, the hem resting at midthigh. Then he’s arching back for the floor, carefully supported by Thrawn’s hands on his hip and back. He holds there for one second. Two. Three.
The next moment he’s up and off Thrawn’s thigh but still not quite back on the floor, his feet moving through a complex set of flicks and kicks and embellishments. Between Thrawn’s legs, over his thigh, through the air behind Veers. He touches the floor again and falls into a crouch with one leg extended.
The sound Piett makes in response might be slightly strangled. Pellaeon, who had made his way over sometime during the dance, pats blindly at Piett’s arm in sympathy.
Thrawn spins them both, Veers tracing a large circle along the floor with the pointed toe of his shoe. It shows off the long, muscular line of his leg to great effect.
Piett’s pretty sure Vanto’s rolling his eyes at them when he says, “Hopeless, the both of you.”
And well.
He’s not exactly wrong.
—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Veers slams his eyes shut the moment he steps through the doors of Jerjerrod’s office.
“Oh you don’t have to do that,” Jerjerrod insists. “I can lower the lights.”
“Yes I do,” Veers says, slightly grim. He also refuses to approach the guest chair.
“But-”
“I can see in the UV spectrum, Moff Jerjerrod.” Veers grimaces, pained.
“Oh,” Jerjerrod says in a tiny voice. “Perhaps the auxiliary conference room then?”
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With a whoop, Veers hurls himself off the top of the hangerbay catwalks. Lieutenants Alves and Geffery follow him, with Major Edwards a beat behind him. They plunge for the floor, wings unfurling behind them.
Edwards has to pull up first, wings beating hard at air. He curls up and away as the ground approaches. His bright green feathers nearly hit Geffery in the face and she squawks indignantly, immediately breaking off with a roll to chase after Edwards instead.
Veers has to twist to prepare for landing sooner than Alves and he watches the smaller man shoot past him. He trips and faceplants on his landing as Veers watches. Laughing, Veers touches down with a thump.
“I believe that means I win,” he says, offering his lieutenant a hand up.
“I reached the ground first,” Alves grumbles, taking it.
“With your face!” Geffery laughs, dive bombing them as she does. Edwards chases her off.
“Sticking the landing is a requirement for a reason, Alves,” Veers says, amused. The only response he gets is a sullen shuffle of black wings.
“If you’re done giving the entire hangerbay a heart attack sir,” Covell says dryly, “perhaps we might start the walker inspections?”
—-------------------------------------------------------------------
As the first AT-AT topples, Luke sees the top hatch of the leading walker pop open. A figure hauls themself out. Suicidal, frankly, in this battle and this weather.
But he can’t see what happens to them as he has to dodge the fire of a third walker. By the time he rights the ship, the figure has disappeared.
And for the next minute, the battle proceeds as normal. Another snowspeeder lines up to replicate the cable technique.
A shadow falls over Luke’s snowspeeder. A bird. Except there aren’t any birds that big on Hoth.
He looks up to see a winged figure bank, twist, and hurl a thermal detonator right at the ship attempting to tangle up the next walker.
There’s thud on the roof of his cockpit. He looks up to see icy grey eyes staring at him assessingly through the cockpit glass. The snowspeeder that had been chasing Veers, and it is Veers because there’s no mistaking that face from the propaganda posters, and the walker after Luke to both cease firing.
Luke’s comm explodes with chatter from the other Rogues as Veers watches him. He thinks for a heartbeat that Vader’s general is going to somehow reach through the cockpit and drag him to his lord. And then he takes another look at Veers and realizes the alien General doesn’t have anything capable of breaking through the glass on him. Not besides the thermal detonator. And Vader wants Luke alive.
Veers seems to come to the same conclusion because he’s up and sprinting across the top of the snowspeeder. He leaps off the other end, throwing himself into a dive. His wings unfurl and then tuck around his body as he hurtles towards the ship below Luke’s.
Luke loses track of Veers for a bit, distracted by the damage his own ship has taken and its imminent crash. The snowspeeder plows into the ground. Luke can see the slow advance of the AT-AT toward them, on a path to crush their ship.
But the walker halts a step before it would destroy Luke's speeder. Luke scrambles out and the Force screams a warning heartbeats before a large weight hits him in the back. He's bowled over, face first into the snow, the flapping of large wings loud behind him. And then hands close on his wrists. Cold metal binders snap shut.
Luke is hauled to his feet and dragged beneath the shadow of the general's walker. A platform descends to meet them.
"Lord Vader," Veers says from behind him, presumably into a comm. "I have Skywalker."