Phasma (phasmic) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2017-09-28 14:46:00 |
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Phasma had been keeping a close watch on the cave where Dameron and Viceroy Organa were camped out, despite the fact that Poe had told her not to. She wasn’t about to take orders from him and this looked enough like she was stalking the two of them to pass if anyone was watching her back at the compound. What she was really doing was sitting in a small, dark recess in one of the primary branches of the cave - a choke-point - waiting for anyone who so much as seemed disagreeable to wander past. She wanted to be close enough to hear if there was a scuffle inside, but far enough away that they wouldn’t stumble on her in their daily coming and going. She’d learned well enough how to ration when she was young and her supplies were still at about half, even after a little more than a day hunkered down there. The food she’d scavenged was questionable, but she’d eaten worse, and the water was a bit gritty but ultimately clean. She’d survived on less and she’d survived on worse, but what she would have given for one of those old machines from home in the first day here. She wouldn’t have known much of what to do with it after the initial processes, but nutrients were nutrients and she’d subsisted on ration bars for weeks in the field before. The human body could take so much damage and stress and foul treatment and still press onward. It was beautiful. But that was before she woke on the fourth morning, the fifth full day in the arena, startling awake from a strange dream with the feeling of someone watching her. Her head throbbed and despite the cool, muggy air, her skin felt she had been lying in the sun for hours and the back of her neck, chest, and forehead was coated in a thin sheen of sweat. Perfect, she thought. The poetic irony wouldn’t have been lost on her either. Phasma started checking for insect bites along every bare inch of skin - taking off her boots and socks and rolling up her pants to look, rolling up her sleeves, checking under her collar, and feeling in any gap that the little bastards might have crawled into. But she found nothing. It was a small relief. Bad water, then. It had to be. She’d suffer it out. She was just lacing her boots back up when the source of that other feeling revealed itself. Phasma could hear him coming, perhaps that was what had woken her in the first place, but it wasn’t like she didn’t know every square inch of those tunnels now. “Dameron,” she said, dropping one foot back to the ground and lifting the other to start on that boot. “Can I help you?” Poe stopped, his hand settled on the empty place at his hip where his blaster might have sat - in some other world. He was entirely unarmed, here, and had been since the beginning; when Organa was asleep, Poe had charge of his knives, but that was about it. Nothing had fallen into his hands, and that was fine by him. He’d meant what he’d said when this whole mess kicked off: he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Not to protect himself; not even to protect the man he’d sworn to guard, the father whose daughter had already once had to watch, helpless, as he was snuffed out. Not even to get at Phasma. She looked about as close to getable as she’d ever been, too - he had no illusions that he could be a match for her with both arms tied behind her back and a leg beside, but here, huddled in this little corner, clearly wounded and glistening with the tell-tale signs of fever, he could nearly have imagined it. He stayed back, a few paces distant. They hadn’t bothered one another until now, and he was prepared to take her at her word - that she had no intention of making trouble for him. So long as she was prepared to take him at his, he was content to allow a cool detente in their mutual rancor until they were back at the compound. This place had been large enough for the two of them until now, and it could continue to be so until whatever catalyst was fated to bring all of this to an end was finally deployed. He’d experienced a moment of guilty remorse, when he’d first heard Bail’s name called in place of Finn’s, because one of them, at least, was a soldier, trained in survival and in self-defense - but now, staring her down in this passageway, he was deeply glad that Finn was as far away from her as he could be. “I’m camped near here,” he said, flat. “You can help me by staying where you are.” Don’t come any closer, and we won’t have a problem. Against his better judgment, he added, propelled to kindness by he didn’t know fucking what: “I’m going to get food. I’ll bring you some. If you don’t move.” “I know,” Phasma said as she finished tying off her other boot and settled both feet to the ground now, shifting back into the alcove. She could almost fade into the shadows, but that had always been her gift. Silent, swift, able to meld with the darkness. A ruthless and skilled hunter. And she made no attempt to move, even though her knife was inches from her fingers and she could have him down with his throat opened up in a matter of seconds. She was true to her word - this time, at least. She had no intention of harming him or the Viceroy. She held her hands up as he spoke, giving him a smirk and a shake of her head, “I have no intention to move at the moment,” she said. “And I wouldn’t turn down the offer anyway. I’ll be right here when you get back.” As long as it didn’t deplete her own stores, she didn’t really care where it came from, and she didn’t think Poe was clever enough to try to poison her. Or he might have been, actually, but she thought it was far too indirect for him. If he was going to kill her, which he wasn’t, she could only imagine that he would do so in the most straightforward way possible. Sabotage was her weapon, not his. Still, the thought entertained her for a moment or two while she watched him go. Phasma waited until he was well out of sight before she pulled her own spare water from her bag and washed her hands then washed off the wound on her face for the first of, likely, many times that day. At least the pain had dulled - not the headache, but the pain in her ribs and the burning along the side of her cheek had both almost entirely subsided and now, of course, was replaced with a new and even more obnoxious ailment. This would no doubt be the nature of these games for her, but Phasma wasn’t one to complain. She just tucked her things away again and pushed her sweat-damp hair off her forehead, then waited for Dameron to return. Food wasn’t the word he’d have used for this stuff a day or two ago, but that was adaptation: quick, progressive, and almost always a little degrading. He’d gone back to mushrooms, after his trek a couple days ago for something more filling had ended abruptly in a room he’d realized very quickly he didn’t want to be in. Good enough would do for him, until... Until whenever. Until they could return to a place where the comfort of his friends and enemies alike didn’t press him down every second of every day. He’d filled his shirtfront with the mushroom caps that hadn’t killed him last time; he sat cross-legged a little distance from her so that he could scoop out a handful, and set them gently on the ground between them. (They were already covered in dirt, after all - no sense being fussy.) “You look ill,” he said, unable (and not terribly eager) to soften the clipped, abrupt tone that came with his tight jaw. “I don’t have anything for that. Do you?” He doubted it, somehow; the name of the game around here had been scarcity. But she’d chosen a decent place to hide and attempt to lick her wounds. He and Bail had been relatively undisturbed here for a few days. So far. His face was never blank, really - but it was hard, now, his mouth set, his gaze straight, a slight crease between his brows the only manifestation of the anger that suffused all of his interactions with her. The straight-backed position in which he sat wasn’t one he could leap up from easily; it was not a concern. “If you don’t - I’ve walked through the water in the room we started in, a few times, and nothing’s bit my ankles.” It probably wasn’t a bad place for a cooling bath. Palliative measures were all he had to suggest - or quarantine, which struck him as far too cruel, even if he’d been able to impose it. When he returned, Phasma was, as she promised, right where he’d left her. One leg was crossed under her and the other was propped up, ready to spring forward if she needed to, but her eyes were closed and her head rested back against the stone wall behind her. The only sign that she was still awake was that her hand was resting firmly on the hilt of her knife, ready to move into action if any footsteps that weren’t his came down that tunnel. She looked over at him as he settled on the ground across from her, dropped her hand away from her knife and reached for her bag instead. From there, she pulled out one of the rationed portions of bread - one of the last - tore it in half, and offered one of the halves to him. A little, she had decided, may get her rather a lot in the long run and the bread was going to go off in a day or two anyway. It needed to be used up. May as well be used up for forging allies. Phasma shrugged, “Iodine tablets,” she answered, “compliments of, I assume, Hux; since our valiant and heroic representatives care little for me on their own. But I never have made the best first impressions.” It didn’t seem to bother her at all, whether people cared for her or not. That wasn’t where the tone of vague annoyance in her voice came from. It circled around the word heroic, dug in, and festered there. The ones who placed themselves in that position, who claimed to be the defenders of the disenfranchised and forgotten, so often forgot the ones they were supposed to be defending. That bitterness was rooted deep in her, and she wasn’t about to be forced to disclose her own past just so they would take pity on her when she didn’t want or need their pity in the first place. Not that they would care. Not that any of them had ever cared beyond themselves in her experience. “You burn out a fever,” she continued, casting the thought away as quickly as it had come to her in the first place, “burn out whatever infection is causing it, whether it’s bad water or,” she gestured towards the wound on her face. It didn’t look infected. If anything, it seemed to be healing fine, if a little red around the edges. But that was to be expected considering she’d cauterized the wound. “I’ve felt the stone through here, there’s a thermal vein running through these caverns and if there’s any logic to this place at all, it may empty out somewhere. I should be able to find it without much difficulty. I’ll move on, once we’re finished here, and start looking for that.” Poe took the bread, and he ate it, silently and quickly. Going hungry was nothing he’d ever had to do - not for more than a day or two. His family had always provided for him, and none of the institutions to which he’d belonged had ever required it of their soldiers. But the logic of it was easy to absorb. He would eat what he had when he had it - at least, when he didn’t feel secure enough to keep it on his person, and share. Here, he did not feel secure. “There’s a spring,” he confirmed, nodding down at the ground - or the dark where he knew the ground to be. He’d never been claustrophobic, really, but the darkness was beginning to have a similar effect on him. He felt like he wanted to flex every muscle in his body and just explode free of it, or run and claw his way through the walls until he found light. It put him on edge. It planted a tension between his shoulders he couldn’t sake, as many times as he tried to roll it out of his neck. “A hot spring. It’s not far from here. You’d do better hydrating. Use those tablets. Get some water. And don’t -” He bit off his words - he’d never been very good, never good at all, at holding his tongue, at moderating his impulses into what he ought to have said. Only in the very heat of battle did things tend to fall by the wayside, because there was no point because there was no time because any commentary could only have slowed things down or made them worse; and that was the case here, surely. There was no point in any exchange between the two of them. It would serve only to provoke - to flare his temper needlessly. And yet. First impressions? Really? “After what you’ve done - you don’t get to sneer at your valiant representatives because - for anything. You deserve to die in a cave. They’d only be a little wrong to let you.” He shrugged - a violent jab of his shoulder that pulled something painfully along his spine. “You won’t because that’s not the kind of place we’re in. But you’d have it coming.” Phasma tipped her head to the side, not quite a shrug and not quite a nod but somewhere in between. She knew she had to be careful with what she said here, that there were people watching and she had to choose her words carefully, delicately, though she had never been good with much other than blunt and forthright. But this… she felt the weight of this strangely and suddenly and she didn’t much care for that. “Perhaps,” she said. “But not for the reasons you think. I know the stories and the propaganda, I know the lies, I don’t need to ask what it is that you’ve heard about me to make you so disdainful, I know it all well enough. Most of them I’ve put out there myself. Fear is a weapon and I wield it as well as any other. But I also know that anything I could say to set the record straight would only be seen as pretty excuses. So why bother?” She could tell him that she wasn’t the one plucking children from their home planets, that they didn’t come to her until they’d been training for years already, or that she’d overhauled Brendol Hux’s programs as soon as she’d been able. She could tell him that she’d come from a bitter, dying planet abandoned and forgotten by the Republic like so many other planets, but that they weren’t forgotten by the First Order. And that was a chance that the Republic hadn’t given them. They left them there to die. If his side had cared enough to do the same, they might have been having a very different conversation then, because Phasma would have gotten on any ship that got her off of that hell, it didn’t matter who it belonged to. It was just her luck, though, that it had been Hux’s ship. For better or worse. “I don’t fault you your feelings towards me,” she continued, “we stand on opposite sides of a war, and we’ve discussed our idealistic differences at length already. We’re never going to agree, you and I. But just because we handle things differently because our choices are informed by different upbringings and different experiences, doesn’t mean we can’t respectfully work together when put in situations like these.” “I’ll work with you,” Poe corrected her. Respectfully wasn’t in the cards. “I’m not going to start stepping over people just because some pack of power-mad researchers decides it would be fun to watch. That’s why I’m sharing with you. That’s why I’m telling you: drink your damn water instead of sitting in a hot bath. I don’t give a shit if you don’t fault me for my feelings. I fault you for being part of something that destroys lives, and families, and entire star systems, and thinking you can sit here and - and try to hand me a crock of shit about how it’s all just a difference of opinion. Of upbringing. Of experience. No experience anyone’s ever had could possibly excuse what you’ve done. You want respectfully? Don’t talk to me like you think I’m a fucking moron.” He started gathering his share of his mushrooms back into the basket of his shirt, which he’d let droop during their conversation; his gestures were clumsy and overquick, but bruised mushrooms were still mushrooms. “Like you think I’m dumb enough to sit here and swallow this line about how everything bad I’ve ever heard about you is a story, or a lie, or propaganda. You must think I’ve got a skull like a - like I don’t even know.” Fucking honestly. It had been a bad idea to say anything, and he’d known it at the time, and here he was - wasting time, and stress, and calories on working himself up over nothing new. That the First Order’s top brass didn’t even believe strongly enough in what they were pushing not to try to weasel out of it at the first opportunity could come as no surprise, when it was patently obvious their ideology was no ideology at all, just a bare power grab born of a toxic morass of xenophobia and a thwarted sense of entitlement. If you owned the universe just because, it stood to reason that you had no responsibility for anything you’d ever done, that you could think all you had to do was show up somewhere and say well, gosh, I know there were some bad stories, but can’t we all just coexist? To be a part of something while it caused so much pain and destruction, and then to insinuate that you’d had your reasons - It was the epitome of cowardice. But this again was nothing new, and it was nothing more important than bringing food back to the people to whom he’d promised it. He stood, awkward with his precarious cargo. “Do what you want. If you need something -” He stopped himself; recalculated. “If I see you here tomorrow, I’ll bring you something. That’s all.” Phasma was on her feet far quicker and with more ease than Poe; she had been poised for it in case a threat approached. But this wasn’t a threat. Necessarily. It also wasn’t a situation that she could easily diffuse and she was perfectly aware of that, so she wasn’t even going to try. There was no more point in that then there was in her trying to convince him that she wasn’t what he thought she was - because she was. She’d never said she wasn’t a ruthless killer, that she wasn’t a tool of the First Order, only that he was lacking in the whole story and that what accounts he had got twisted in the telling - which was the absolute truth. Whether he believed them or not was no matter to her. But now, for some reason - and she honestly didn’t even know why or what she wanted to achieve from it - she needed him to hear her. She needed one damn person in this entire universe to hear her and it was going to be him. Because he was stubborn and thick-skulled and he reminded her of someone. She reached out for his arm with her dominant hand - intentionally, so he would know that she couldn’t reach for her knife at the same time - and turned him towards the darkness. Phasma had gotten rather skilled at hiding from security cameras and security droids in her time on the Finalizer and she treated this as much the same. Then she leaned in close, her grip on his arm still firm, and in a barely-audible whisper, murmured against his ear, “He made me watch when he destroyed my planet.” And that was all the more she could risk at that moment. But when she pulled away - or rather, when she shoved him away - there was a look on her face for a fraction of a second that was a mix of hatred and fear and regret. Then it was gone, replaced at once by the same steely mask she always wore; impenetrable, and just a bit savage. “I’ll take your advice, Dameron,” she said, “but I’ll take my own as well. I know how to treat a fever. They’re common enough where I’m from and some even survive them. Show me this spring.” Poe tensed against her grip, shoving his arm back against her hand with a sharp roll of his shoulder - but between her strength advantage and his reluctance to let his harvest fall to the ground again and his deep, visceral reluctance to strike out, he stumbled forward a step, turning where she directed. He stood stone still, his nerves taut and singing, his heart hammering, a rush of hot anger rising to his face. He stared into the dark with a look that could have burned through durasteel - and he jerked his face away a couple centimeters at her low voice in his ear. The spike of his anger made itself felt in his throat, in the clench of his fist in the fabric of his shirt. It was an all too familiar rage - half anguish or more, a wailing, furious, guilty grief. My planet. He ought to have thought of Leia - and she was there, as she always was, lingering at the edges of the darkest moments in his life. He hadn’t had to watch, no, but he had heard, and he had seen, and he had just begun to count the innumerable dead when he’d come here, and - He staggered away when she let go, and caught himself a pace or two down the passage, only a couple of mushrooms bouncing out ahead of him. He swallowed, and didn’t turn again to face her; when he spoke, there was a hoarse edge to his voice, something more scorched than scathing. “And you followed him.” Whoever him was - Snoke, or Ren, or Hux, it didn’t matter. He didn’t look at her again - he just went, off in the direction of their camp and the spring. “Wait outside,” he barked. If she wanted to follow him, fine. She wasn’t coming anywhere near the place until he’d told Bail and let him move out. No, Phasma thought, I killed him. But it would do her no good to say that here, now. Some part of her words had gotten through to some part of him and that was all that mattered. Even if he responded with white-hot rage, it didn’t matter, he reacted. She’d seen a flash of what she was looking for and it was enough to cast her in silence again. She crouched and picked up the few mushrooms Poe had dropped, sliding them into one of side pockets of the bag before tugging the zipper closed again, then followed him. She knew the layout of the cave well enough to know what comprised “outside”, how far away to linger and how to stay out of sight until Poe had done what he needed to do within and returned to show her the way to the spring. As much as she’d bucked at following commands from the Viceroy, it wasn’t hard to follow Dameron’s orders - he had a familiar way about him, and she was used to working alongside men like him, regardless of how their opinions about the world differed. It wasn’t where she expected to find allies, but she would rather be with someone from her world than with anyone else. There were plenty of people she liked well enough, others she could have found who might have offered her a more strategic advantage for a time, but she’d rather be here, where she knew where she stood. |