Never Felt So Good

[Hawkins Grime]

Chaltatha ran her hand through CENSORED's hair. She chuckled, admiring the bloody gouges that ran from his left eye, down his jaw, and to his neck.

You can't have scars like these, my little monster. Your enemies will think you are prone to it.

The young boy put his hand up to his face, running his index finger along the edge of it and bringing it to his good eye for examination.

"I still killed them though, so I won right?"

Against them, little monster. There are always more to kill. One victory means nothing and you can only take so many scars before they overwhelm you.

"I'll never lose..."

Of course you won't, my monster. You are still young.

=======

e'Drain sat outside, on top of the Black Wyvern, Grime's YT-1930 series. Orar stood over him as Morrolan used his electro-spanner to tighten a plate down on the hull.

"So why do you work for A'den again? He is weak and fragile. I saw what is laying in engineering,,,"

The pilot looked up at the young Mandalorian and sighed.

"And your real point?"

The boy folded his arms across his chest.

"One would almost feel mercy for that thing, and want to put him down, yes?"

[Lilaena De'Ville]

She'd spent the required amount of time with her teammates, though they seemed to drink a lot on their down time and De'Ville refused to take part in hard alcohol. The day the news that Palpatine had died reached her she had gotten blindingly drunk, and paid the price with a huge hangover the next day. Ultimately it wasn't worth losing her senses for an hour of feeling wobbly.

De'Ville found her way to Pad 117 in the port sector of Foamwander City, and approached the Black Wyvren slowly. Her senses were open, wary of a trap. She was ninety-eight percent sure Hawkins wasn't going to try anything, but the other two percent knew that he blazed with hate for her and would try to kill her. Whether it was today or years from now, he would attempt to make her pay for paying attention to him that day on Onderon.

In the open area in front of the ship, De'Ville waved briefly at the figures on top of the freighter.

[Hawkins Grime]

Orar noticed Manda'lor's entrance and he waved in return, trying to not seem too eager despite the overwhelming pride within him. Bretak had instructed him to be wary that his pride might be his downfall, it was just hard to hide it before the being that would bring the Mandalorians into the future once more.

Morrolan looked up at Orar and then at what the boy was staring at and grimaced.

=======

"So?"

"He is... hurt bad. Chroma can't tell if the damage there is new or old."

Rowan sat in the lounge with her arms up on the dejarik table, her hands around the metal cup of coffee, keeping them warm. e'Drain stood across the room from her, staring at the ground. They had just brought Grime back to the Wyvern from his meeting with De'Ville and put him in the engineering hold that took up the middle of the ship. They had put his exoskeleton up on the work table and the two of them had forced open the leg that was immobilized.

e'Drain knew death, he knew mortality, he had caused it and been witness to it over and over. But he was not viciously cruel like Grime, this was a profession. The flesh, or whatever it was, they saw when they opened the exoskeleton was what e'Drain could only see as a rag doll held together by mere strands, riding the edge between life and death.

They had left him then, to his screams and moans as Chroma MK I, the AI, not the giant killer droid, Chroma MK II, had attended to fixing what it could of the exoskeleton while cleaning the debris out of the flesh.

=======

Grime was still in there but Chroma had reported not but an hour ago that he was stable and a temporary fix had been made for the leg. The main concluding point that Chroma had made was that Grime needed a new exoskeleton. Grime had then insisted on it and told e'Drain what he intended.

It sounded like a lot of work in the end.

Morrolan stood and lowered himself down the ladder. Orar grabbed an overhanging cable and gracefully, despite a little voice in e'Drain wanting him to trip up, hit the ground. e'Drain honestly kind of liked the kid but just because a bunch of Mandalorians say you are a man, don't mean you are a man.

He faced the woman approaching them and tried not to sigh before he started speaking. e'Drain had to force his hands together to keep from resting them on his pistols. He wanted this to be as friendly as it possibly could be.

"Do you need to speak with Grime or just leave a message? He wanted to speak with you if you showed up but to be honest... Well, whatever. Your choice."

[Lilaena De'Ville]

"Take me to him," she replied, her eyes meeting his. e'Drain nodded, as if he'd expected as much, and turned to lead the way. De'Ville caught his elbow, stopping him.

"Why do you stay with him?" She dropped her hand, not wanting to make the man too uncomfortable, but wanting an answer. "He clearly depends on you."

[Hawkins Grime]

e'Drain's shoulders slumped slightly at the question and he slid a glove off to rub a relatively clean hand through his brown hair as he glanced at the lady for a second. He definitely had not been prepared for that question and Morrolan had thought he was on guard enough to not be kicked off his feet in a conversation already.

"If you had asked me that when he first signed me up, I would've told you the loot and the pay were some of the best I'd seen this far off from Nar Shadda... Now though?"

He turned and led the way up into the belly of the Wyvern, checking over his shoulder to make sure she was coming.

"I used to think I was already washed out of the business, a decade too old for any jobs worth the salt. Not with Grime. And it might sound corny that the Boss, as bitter and vile as you know he can be, has given me a new purpose in life, but whatever."

e'Drain had just been another gun hand back then, nothing really to his name, running free lance out of the slums of the slums and just barely getting by. Then Grime had shown up and said take the job or die. Not that the Boss had given him much of a choice, his life otherwise hadn't been that much beforehand and it would've likely ended in relative insignificance, face down in some gutter somewhere back there with a blaster in his back.

Orar followed behind them, relatively unimpressed with e'Drain's answer. A'den was not worth giving meaning to life. Orar believed that A'den was a quick burning flame and soon enough he would extinguish himself and leave the lot of them staring at their feet. Orar smirked, that was probably what Manda'lor figured as well.

The Black Wyvern was surprisingly clean within. e'Drain turned to face Lilaena as he stopped short of the engineering hold that took up the middle of the YT-1930's hull. Rowan Averre tried to make herself unnoticeable as she saw De'Ville on board from where she sat behind the dejarik table in the lounge.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

She hadn't known what to expect on the inside of Grime's ship, and found it lived in, but clean. A small female was sitting in the lounge at the dejarik table, trying as hard as she could to be invisible, so De'Ville did her a favor and ignored her.

"Money can only take you so far," she agreed with e'Drain. "If you think that Grime values your loyalty, then he is lucky to have found you."

The Dark Jedi looked around the lounge, her gaze barely touching the woman (girl?) by the games table. Orar was standing behind her, and she still was not sure why he was with Hawkins. "Grime is not here," De'Ville said, unnecessarily.

[Hawkins Grime]

Averre almost coughed up her drink as she placed it back down on the table, her eyes, a bit watery now from the cough and sting of hot caffeine in her nostrils, went to Morrolan.

=======

They both sat in the lounge, playing a slow and relatively uneventful card game that Morrolan loathed but Averre found exciting. A major point in his loathing was that inevitably, she always seemed to win. He knew that the end game had to do with patterns and setting them up early, the middle was all luck though and every now and then he could clean her out before it really developed. Regardless, he smirked as he laid a new set down on the table. Rowan stared at them impassively before placing a match and counter down.

"What the?!"

"Can I ask you something?"

e'Drain was completely caught off guard at the question and took a moment to digest it. Rowan had been slowly but surely coming out of her shell with the crew, e'Drain didn't count Chroma MK I, the AI, because that was more like her personal robotic diary of sorts, or something like that. But rarely was she ever so forward or pose a question in such a manner. Given the circumstances, Morrolan thought she might have made a great card shark in another life.

"Okay, shoot."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are we still here...? Why didn't he kill us like... why didn't he kill us like...?"

It hung in the air, and the hesitation was a bit more what he was used to from the girl. Girl, woman, whatever, e'Drain just knew she looked too young in any sense he might consider her. But yeah, the question hung in the air.

Why did Hawkins Grime not kill us back on Uta'pau like he had killed Ithiel Malchiel?

=======

He glanced at Rowan with a slight smirk before addressing De'Ville with a shrug.

"He's sleeping, or whatever he does that is equivalent. You won't startle him awake or anything, just get his attention when you first go in, he'll snap out of it."

e'Drain slid his hand over the console and the door to the engineering bay opened. The smell of burnt metal and blood came with it. The room wasn't spacious, filled with shelves of Averre's equipment and lined with screens and consoles that she operated from. It was a techy's dream inside until one saw the nightmare laying on the work bench in the middle of the circular room like it was an operating table.

There lay Grime, his feet closest to the operating table. Just above the ankle of his left leg, the exoskeleton was open up to the middle of the thigh. The living tissue exposed there was hard to comprehend as actually living; Averre had set up a surgical field around it with a small device that resembled a slightly glowing net, making it visible to the eye but kept it under pressure and sterile.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

De'Ville walked up to the workbench where Hawkins was lying in repose, the metallic tang of blood in the air. The engineering bay felt cramped, and nearly every surface was covered with various bits of equipment, most of which she could not identify.

She stood over her apprentice, as obstinate and unruly of a student as she'd ever come across. Was it worth it to continue with him? De'Ville sighed quietly, alone in the room with him. It would be simple enough to extinguish him. Perhaps even preferable to waking him up and talking to him.

She looked down the length of his exoskeleton to his opened up leg, examining the raw flesh and blood vessels visible. It reminded her of some of her lessons with A'na Eldhil, for some reason, and remembering A'na made her angry.

De'Ville returned to his shoulder and rested her hands lightly on the bench beside him. "Hawkins."

[Hawkins Grime]

The eyelids were artificial but they opened slowly enough as if Hawkins had been asleep. The eyes greatly contrasted to the perfect complexion of his porcelain features, focusing to the light and then on Lilaena's face. The room's temperature sharply rose for a brief instant, resulting in a slight groan from Hawkins.

Sera...?!

=======

"CENSORED."

"Sera."

=======

His eyes, broken irises of blue tinged with yellow scarring, seemed to fill with some foreign emotion as a metal hand lifted from the table slowly as if to reach for Lilaena's face then Grime hissed in pain, his eyes refocusing with hatred beneath them. The arm fell back with a light clang. The heat vanished just as quickly.

"... De'Ville."

The metal plates that overlapped his chest heaved for a moment as if stifling a cough.

"I'm glad you could make it... I missed you."

[Lilaena De'Ville]

De'Ville looked down at him in silence for a moment. "Your people are surprisingly loyal. I suppose you wouldn't appreciate it if one of them wandered off to do whatever they liked, regardless of what your plans for them were, and then came back, bold as brass, as if nothing had happened?"

She narrowed her eyes. "What would you propose as punishment for such a person?"

[Hawkins Grime]

He could feel the useless muscles in his real face, the bloody mass underneath the porcelain doll, twitch and struggle against the mask. The woman could make her judgments. His crew had relatively no real comparison in their relationships to him as he did with her. But for the sake of the game and between mental flashes of slamming De'Ville against the wall, nailing her to it with Averre's tools, and sticking his metal hand up inside her rib cage and gripping her heart before she could die from shock...

"I would cut their legs out from underneath them and keep them leashed to me until they learned their place... Figuratively, of course."

He meant every word; it was a practical approach to managing crew mates and subordinates. But again, De'Ville and Grime were in a different kind of position with each other.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

"Interesting." She trailed a finger along the smooth 'skin' of his arm. "Though the situation does not perfectly mirror our current... situation... it bears thinking on."

De'Ville wet her lips with her tongue, and bit her bottom lip slightly as she thought out loud. "Now it seems we have seen each other at our most vulnerable. And both lived to speak about it.

"My master used to whip the skin off my back if I made a mistake during her teaching, or if I was sick when it was inconvenient for her." Her green eyes flicked up to his tortured blue ones, and she raised an eyebrow. "You saw the scars. And yet she did not break me. Brainwashed me, perhaps, into loving her, into wanting her to beat me to make me strong for her purpose. And in my love for her I was strong. Unstoppable.

"And yet... I was not as strong as I am now. Now that I know how she used me, how she tortured me - a child, now that I know her lies." De'Ville's voice remained steady and quiet, though her tone grew more stern and clipped. "My hate of her, my anger grows every day.

"And with it as my armor, I am practically invincible."

She leaned over his tortured body, encased in its protective, malfunctioning shell, and pressed her palms down on his chest and stomach before he could move in protest. De'Ville channeled the hate into her power, turning the workbench and Grime into a bright spot in the Force, if one could have seen the Force at work, and exhaled slowly and loudly. Her eyes rolled back into her head and her lips worked silently as she delved into his body with the Force, using what little she had been taught of the healing arts and building upon it with her intuition.

Broken blood vessels and torn muscles were painfully stitched back together. The horror that was Grime's body would have been impossible to heal for even a dedicated Jedi Healer, his skin completely gone and beyond repair. But after a minute of wrenching pain for both of them, Lilaena staggered back a bit, tears spilling down her cheeks in some sort of reflex action.

She leaned her weight on one hand that rested beside his shoulder on the work bench, breathing heavily.

[Hawkins Grime]

CENSORED sat up, his fingers digging into his chest where his heart was beating like a hammer. He gasped for breath in a cold sweat, looking around the dark room, hung with blood red drapes and strange porcelain masks on the walls, each one conveying a different expression or emotion.

He had been having a dream, a nightmare, of being tortured into a state of unlife, locked in a box from which he could still see the universe but everything was bathed in gore and blood...

His other hand drifted to the shoulder of the woman beside him, tracing down her bare back, his fingers running along the length of a number of scars.

"Sera... My Morghelia..."

CENSORED placed his hand back on her shoulder as she murmured something. As she turned to face him, the blackness where his heart should have been pounded out of his chest, screaming murder. Sera had no scars. Morghelia had long, flowing brown hair, not short black hair. But as she opened her eyes...

"De'Ville."

========

The metal plates of the exoskeleton rose and fell quickly as Grime nearly hyperventilated. He had not been able to use his lungs at this capacity without assistance from the exoskeleton since being incarcerated within it. The pain was like a tornado of fire in his veins as nerve endings that had long been burned out sent renewed signals of what it was like to be alive. His limbs twitched within the exoskeleton, his metal fingers flexing, eyes wide open.

He turned his head slightly, so that his face was now directed at hers.

"You know my pain and hatred have no bounds... You've tasted it."

I've tasted yours.

"You have your armor..."

Grime found he could grin with slightly more ease, not so much the pain, like a knife between the jaws, that it might have been only moments before.

"Let mine be your weapon. We can..."

The feeling of being alive, the renewed pain, and the haze of clarity through which he could see Lilaena was almost too much.

"We can kill everyone. All of them."

Her Empire. Grime's former partners and associates. Anyone and everyone that fell under the umbrella of their vengeance. And then...

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Her body was trembling as though she'd just run a marathon, and as Grime spoke she closed her eyes, bringing her limbs back under control with a bit of concentration. De'Ville looked down at him again, green eyes bright with indescribable emotion.

"We will destroy them together," she promised, her voice husky. "No one can stand in our way." Not even Callidus.