[Rogues and Wraiths Ficathon 2017] Come in from the cold
Title: Come in From the Cold
For: agent_era, 2017 Rogues & Wraiths Ficathon
Prompt(s):
Character(s): Wes Janson, Tycho Celchu, and a tiny bit of Winter
Summary: Wes struggles to come back from the events at Distna. Tycho tries to help, but the struggle hits a little close to home.
[Author's note: I took a few liberties with the first couple of prompts, but I hope I sprinkled enough angst throughout to make up for it :)]
Death is silence. Silence and a complete absence of sensation that is exquisitely painful in its own way. Now that he’s alive again, Wes needs sound, lights, stimulation… anything to keep from slipping back into the dark again.
At work it’s fine. Just fine. There’s always something to turn his mind to: flashing lights, chatter, pseudo-near-death experiences. The sims are immersive and, thankfully have a kill-switch. He hasn’t had to resort to that yet, for which his pride is grateful, but it’s nice to know it’s there. He can still laugh it off, still rub Wedge the wrong way just for the fun of it, though the Commander is obviously letting him get away with more than he usually would. They all are. Wes sees it in their eyes, even though they all think they’re doing such a good job of hiding it.
His friends. His squadmates. They’re afraid to push back, and that hurts. If they’re afraid he might break, maybe he should be too.
What does he have to complain about anyway? It’s not like he actually died. The medical droid had been pretty clear on that. His body temperature and heartrate had both dropped dangerously low, but his heart had never actually stopped. The one line that Wes Janson has never crossed.
Wes takes another drink. It’s loud in the club, the music pounding like the beat of a second heart. Lights flash and twirl along with a dozen kinds of skin and scale and limbs. Most of them are out of their minds on one thing or another, gyrating and pulsing in a kaleidoscope of reds, purples and blues.
“Interesting place to brood.”
Wes turns away from the dancers, toward a familiar voice. Dressed as usual in dark clothing, Tycho slides onto the stool next to him at the bar. He stands out against the swirl of patterns like a black hole that Janson’s anonymity just disappeared into.
“Did Wedge send you?” Wes’ eyes are red and bleary even in the dim, colourful light.
“Winter did, actually.”
“And here I thought she was immune to my charms.”
“Lucky for me,” Tycho’s smile doesn’t quite erase the sympathy in his eyes. It had been Winter, keenly perceptive as always, that caught on to what the rest of the Rogues had all been too close to catch. When he’d tried to argue that Hobbie should go - they’d always been closest, she’d been adamant. There had been a lengthy lecture about friendship and emotional vulnerability until he’d been inspired to leave his warm bed next to her warm body to come out to this dive.
Truthfully, they were all scared. Wes was fine - he was always fine - and they always counted on that. On him. Wes was the one who was always there with a wisecrack or an inappropriate joke to lighten the mood. No one had wanted to face what life would be like without him, and so when it turned out that they didn’t have to, they’d all been happy to leave it at that.
Even Wedge, usually so attuned to squad dynamics, left this one well alone. No one wants to pick at the scar of their phantom pain.
“Do you want a drink?” Wes asks.
Tycho looks at his friend, at the deep lines etched under his eyes, and thinks of how long he wore that same pain on his own face. It’s been a long time since he’s worn that particular mask, a long time since…
His heart still stops a little each time his mind touches on the word -
A long time since Lusankya.
Tycho rubs a long-fingered hand over his face and sighs. “Yeah.”
Wes motions to the bartender, a cute and curvy little Twi’lek who’s nearly spilling out of her strappy outfit. She doesn’t spill a drop when she slides the shots over to them, though. The liquid is dark, thick, and smells faintly of engine coolant.
“Do I even want to know?” Tycho raises one blond eyebrow.
“It gets the job done,” Wes slams his back in a single gulp and Tycho follows suit. Whatever it is, it hits his bloodstream fast and hard and he has no idea how Wes has been keeping this pace all night. Already the lights on the dancefloor are starting to stretch out and blur together. He shakes his head and it clears a little. Fast high, fast letdown. A good way to sell a lot of drinks.
“Look, Wes…” if he thought strange alien alcohol would make this any easier, he’d misjudged. “About Distna… about… after-“
“Don’t,” Wes’ shoulders come up. “I’m fine.” He doesn’t want to have his conversation. Not here. Not with Tycho. Not at the base. Not with the doctors. Not with anyone, ever. He’s fine. End of story. As long as he can get up in the morning and zip up a flightsuit and haul ass into the cockpit, he’s fine. The rest is just white noise. Just static on the comm that can be ignored as long as some well-intentioned idiot doesn’t draw your attention to it.
“Then what are you doing drinking in a place like this?” Wes is no stranger to the bar scene, but a place like this - other than the curvy Twi’lek - isn’t his usual calibre of haunt.
“Maybe I just wanted a little privacy.” It comes out hard and sharp, but Tycho is cold behind the mask of ice he always wears in public.
“I’m not leaving you here alone like this.”
It shouldn’t, but something about that hurts Wes in his chest, like pulling up so quickly out of a dive that it takes a couple of seconds for the inertial compensators to catch up.
“Look, Tycho, I appreciate that you came out here, but you don’t need to worry about me. Never had a father, never needed one, and never cared. So why don’t you just go home?”
“I’d like to. I really would.” Tycho turns, and for a half of an instant it seems like he might. There is nothing more that he’d like to do than crawl back into bed next to Winter and curl into her and forget about all of this and all of the bad memories that the pain in Wes’ eyes dredge up. But one advantage to having been a Rogue for so long is that after a few years it becomes pretty obvious when Wes is baiting someone. And it doesn’t even take that long to learn the cues for when Wes is looking for a fight.
Tycho turns back to Wes, puts some of that infamous chill behind his voice. “You know Wes, you may have never needed a father, but you’ve always been good at swallowing your own shi-“
Wes has known Tycho long enough that he doesn’t have to hear the end of the sentence to know it’s an insult. His fist is out and slamming into flesh before Tycho can even get a guard up, but the other man has good reflexes too. Soon they’re both on the sticky floor, rolling in who-knows-what. Wes is the better brawler to be sure, and he’s got weight on his side. But Tycho fights like he flies - calm, precise and calculated. A sharp elbow takes Wes so hard on the temple he sees stars before the two huge Trandoshan bouncers pull them apart and escort them - not gently - out the door in a blur of colour and dance music.
Out on the pavement Tycho pulls himself up to sitting and swipes the back of his hand under his nose, wincing at the red he sees when he pulls his hand away. It’s raining, the oily, slimy rain of the lower levels that makes you feel dirtier instead of cleaner. There’s nothing quite as sobering as getting soaked in cold grime.
“Winter is going to kill me.”
He looks over when Wes doesn’t take the opening. The other man is sitting a couple of handspans away, with his head in his hands, the fight gone out of him.
“Wes?” Tycho reaches out, puts a hand lightly on the other man’s shoulder, and is shrugged off.
“Why is it so easy for you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just look at you - barely a scratch.”
Tycho frowns, light flashing off the sharp planes of his face. In the alley his light eyes look black. “What are we talking about here Janson?”
“You just take it, don’t you? Whatever life throws at you, you can just take it and shrug it off like it’s nothing, because you’re just a perfect poster boy for… perfection.”
“Okay,” Tycho pushes himself up to his feet. “You’re drunk. I don’t know what this is about, but sitting here in the rain isn’t going to help. Come on.”
Wes looks up at the hand Tycho is offering him, greasy rain pouring over his features and flattening his hair.
“I’m not like you Tych.”
“That’s okay. That’s probably a good thing.”
“No. It’s not.”
“Wes-“
“I have these dreams. Had them. When I… when I died, but didn’t die. I dreamt it wasn’t Booster who found me. I dreamt that it was the Empire and they…”
Janson looks away. It’s an expression Tycho recognizes, the inability to maintain eye contact with him, for one reason or another. He’s seen it quite a bit. It makes him feel grimey on the inside.
“That they did to you what they did to me.” Tycho drops his hand back to his side. It’s one thing to live with your own nightmares. It’s another to be someone else’s.
“Except I’m not like you. I always tell them everything. Everything they want to know. And then they kill you all. Because of me.”
“It’s a nightmare, Wes. The worst thing always happens. You’ve been through a lot.”
“It’s not that. It’s that I know it’s true.” His voice hitches on the last word. The pain in the dreams is always excruciating, but the waking up is always worse.
Tycho sits back down and sighs against the weight in his chest, leaning his forearms on his thighs.
“No one knows what they’ll do until they’re in a situation like that. I’m no perfect hero - if anyone knows that, it’s you. I can barely even put what happened into words.”
“I don’t know how you came back from it. After everything they put you through. I got a hero’s welcome and look at me.” Wes holds out his hands to show a slight tremble.
“You essentially died, Wes. I wouldn’t know how to come back from that.”
Wes turns to him, his face cast in stark shadow. “I don’t know that I did.”
And that’s a pain that Tycho feels all too deeply. The pain of not knowing yourself, of not trusting yourself. Of feeling like every time a friend put faith in you that you were quietly betraying him somehow.
His friends, his true friends, had given their trust so freely; it had taken much longer to learn to trust in himself again. He swallows hard against the void of words. There’s really nothing that can be said except…
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Tycho pulls the other man to his feet. They’re both soaked through to the bone, and it’s a cold, miserable trip back to Winter’s apartment.
All is quiet when Tycho gets the door open, but it doesn’t take long for her to appear in the doorway to the bedroom, wrapped in a light blue robe.
“Everything okay?” She glances between them, taking in their dripping, dirty clothing and the bruises on Janson’s knuckles.
“Getting there,” Tycho says, and gives her a look that says everything. Winter has been down in the trenches with him for years; she's been here before. Tycho leads Wes over to the couch while she disappears for a moment to bring out the medkit. In consideration of her line of work, it’s much better equipped than the usual household variety.
Winter sits on the couch next to Wes, and shoos Tycho off for a hot shower and a change of clothes. Wes watches as Tycho leans in to brush a kiss against her cheek before disappearing into the ‘fresher. There had been a time when Tycho had drawn back from even a pat on the shoulder. If Wes were honest, and not steeped in cheap alcohol and self-pity, he might have remembered that Tycho didn't exactly walk away from what he'd been through.
“He’s really okay, isn’t he?” Wes asks, tilting his head over to the closed door of the ‘fresher.
Winter pauses and looks up. Her eyes are so clear it feels like he could freeze and shatter in them. Then she smiles softly, and it lights up her face.
“Yeah. He is. And you will be too.”
And sitting with her, with friends close by, in from the cold and the dark… he can almost believe it.
For: agent_era, 2017 Rogues & Wraiths Ficathon
Prompt(s):
- Distna: Wes is found by the empire and then rescued after the Rogues return. Torture. Nightmares.
- Wes, "I have no idea who my father was Tycho, and frankly, I don't know if I care."
- Distna: "On week! One farking week! You couldn't have possibly found some way to let me know you were still alive?"
Character(s): Wes Janson, Tycho Celchu, and a tiny bit of Winter
Summary: Wes struggles to come back from the events at Distna. Tycho tries to help, but the struggle hits a little close to home.
[Author's note: I took a few liberties with the first couple of prompts, but I hope I sprinkled enough angst throughout to make up for it :)]
Death is silence. Silence and a complete absence of sensation that is exquisitely painful in its own way. Now that he’s alive again, Wes needs sound, lights, stimulation… anything to keep from slipping back into the dark again.
At work it’s fine. Just fine. There’s always something to turn his mind to: flashing lights, chatter, pseudo-near-death experiences. The sims are immersive and, thankfully have a kill-switch. He hasn’t had to resort to that yet, for which his pride is grateful, but it’s nice to know it’s there. He can still laugh it off, still rub Wedge the wrong way just for the fun of it, though the Commander is obviously letting him get away with more than he usually would. They all are. Wes sees it in their eyes, even though they all think they’re doing such a good job of hiding it.
His friends. His squadmates. They’re afraid to push back, and that hurts. If they’re afraid he might break, maybe he should be too.
What does he have to complain about anyway? It’s not like he actually died. The medical droid had been pretty clear on that. His body temperature and heartrate had both dropped dangerously low, but his heart had never actually stopped. The one line that Wes Janson has never crossed.
Wes takes another drink. It’s loud in the club, the music pounding like the beat of a second heart. Lights flash and twirl along with a dozen kinds of skin and scale and limbs. Most of them are out of their minds on one thing or another, gyrating and pulsing in a kaleidoscope of reds, purples and blues.
“Interesting place to brood.”
Wes turns away from the dancers, toward a familiar voice. Dressed as usual in dark clothing, Tycho slides onto the stool next to him at the bar. He stands out against the swirl of patterns like a black hole that Janson’s anonymity just disappeared into.
“Did Wedge send you?” Wes’ eyes are red and bleary even in the dim, colourful light.
“Winter did, actually.”
“And here I thought she was immune to my charms.”
“Lucky for me,” Tycho’s smile doesn’t quite erase the sympathy in his eyes. It had been Winter, keenly perceptive as always, that caught on to what the rest of the Rogues had all been too close to catch. When he’d tried to argue that Hobbie should go - they’d always been closest, she’d been adamant. There had been a lengthy lecture about friendship and emotional vulnerability until he’d been inspired to leave his warm bed next to her warm body to come out to this dive.
Truthfully, they were all scared. Wes was fine - he was always fine - and they always counted on that. On him. Wes was the one who was always there with a wisecrack or an inappropriate joke to lighten the mood. No one had wanted to face what life would be like without him, and so when it turned out that they didn’t have to, they’d all been happy to leave it at that.
Even Wedge, usually so attuned to squad dynamics, left this one well alone. No one wants to pick at the scar of their phantom pain.
“Do you want a drink?” Wes asks.
Tycho looks at his friend, at the deep lines etched under his eyes, and thinks of how long he wore that same pain on his own face. It’s been a long time since he’s worn that particular mask, a long time since…
His heart still stops a little each time his mind touches on the word -
A long time since Lusankya.
Tycho rubs a long-fingered hand over his face and sighs. “Yeah.”
Wes motions to the bartender, a cute and curvy little Twi’lek who’s nearly spilling out of her strappy outfit. She doesn’t spill a drop when she slides the shots over to them, though. The liquid is dark, thick, and smells faintly of engine coolant.
“Do I even want to know?” Tycho raises one blond eyebrow.
“It gets the job done,” Wes slams his back in a single gulp and Tycho follows suit. Whatever it is, it hits his bloodstream fast and hard and he has no idea how Wes has been keeping this pace all night. Already the lights on the dancefloor are starting to stretch out and blur together. He shakes his head and it clears a little. Fast high, fast letdown. A good way to sell a lot of drinks.
“Look, Wes…” if he thought strange alien alcohol would make this any easier, he’d misjudged. “About Distna… about… after-“
“Don’t,” Wes’ shoulders come up. “I’m fine.” He doesn’t want to have his conversation. Not here. Not with Tycho. Not at the base. Not with the doctors. Not with anyone, ever. He’s fine. End of story. As long as he can get up in the morning and zip up a flightsuit and haul ass into the cockpit, he’s fine. The rest is just white noise. Just static on the comm that can be ignored as long as some well-intentioned idiot doesn’t draw your attention to it.
“Then what are you doing drinking in a place like this?” Wes is no stranger to the bar scene, but a place like this - other than the curvy Twi’lek - isn’t his usual calibre of haunt.
“Maybe I just wanted a little privacy.” It comes out hard and sharp, but Tycho is cold behind the mask of ice he always wears in public.
“I’m not leaving you here alone like this.”
It shouldn’t, but something about that hurts Wes in his chest, like pulling up so quickly out of a dive that it takes a couple of seconds for the inertial compensators to catch up.
“Look, Tycho, I appreciate that you came out here, but you don’t need to worry about me. Never had a father, never needed one, and never cared. So why don’t you just go home?”
“I’d like to. I really would.” Tycho turns, and for a half of an instant it seems like he might. There is nothing more that he’d like to do than crawl back into bed next to Winter and curl into her and forget about all of this and all of the bad memories that the pain in Wes’ eyes dredge up. But one advantage to having been a Rogue for so long is that after a few years it becomes pretty obvious when Wes is baiting someone. And it doesn’t even take that long to learn the cues for when Wes is looking for a fight.
Tycho turns back to Wes, puts some of that infamous chill behind his voice. “You know Wes, you may have never needed a father, but you’ve always been good at swallowing your own shi-“
Wes has known Tycho long enough that he doesn’t have to hear the end of the sentence to know it’s an insult. His fist is out and slamming into flesh before Tycho can even get a guard up, but the other man has good reflexes too. Soon they’re both on the sticky floor, rolling in who-knows-what. Wes is the better brawler to be sure, and he’s got weight on his side. But Tycho fights like he flies - calm, precise and calculated. A sharp elbow takes Wes so hard on the temple he sees stars before the two huge Trandoshan bouncers pull them apart and escort them - not gently - out the door in a blur of colour and dance music.
Out on the pavement Tycho pulls himself up to sitting and swipes the back of his hand under his nose, wincing at the red he sees when he pulls his hand away. It’s raining, the oily, slimy rain of the lower levels that makes you feel dirtier instead of cleaner. There’s nothing quite as sobering as getting soaked in cold grime.
“Winter is going to kill me.”
He looks over when Wes doesn’t take the opening. The other man is sitting a couple of handspans away, with his head in his hands, the fight gone out of him.
“Wes?” Tycho reaches out, puts a hand lightly on the other man’s shoulder, and is shrugged off.
“Why is it so easy for you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just look at you - barely a scratch.”
Tycho frowns, light flashing off the sharp planes of his face. In the alley his light eyes look black. “What are we talking about here Janson?”
“You just take it, don’t you? Whatever life throws at you, you can just take it and shrug it off like it’s nothing, because you’re just a perfect poster boy for… perfection.”
“Okay,” Tycho pushes himself up to his feet. “You’re drunk. I don’t know what this is about, but sitting here in the rain isn’t going to help. Come on.”
Wes looks up at the hand Tycho is offering him, greasy rain pouring over his features and flattening his hair.
“I’m not like you Tych.”
“That’s okay. That’s probably a good thing.”
“No. It’s not.”
“Wes-“
“I have these dreams. Had them. When I… when I died, but didn’t die. I dreamt it wasn’t Booster who found me. I dreamt that it was the Empire and they…”
Janson looks away. It’s an expression Tycho recognizes, the inability to maintain eye contact with him, for one reason or another. He’s seen it quite a bit. It makes him feel grimey on the inside.
“That they did to you what they did to me.” Tycho drops his hand back to his side. It’s one thing to live with your own nightmares. It’s another to be someone else’s.
“Except I’m not like you. I always tell them everything. Everything they want to know. And then they kill you all. Because of me.”
“It’s a nightmare, Wes. The worst thing always happens. You’ve been through a lot.”
“It’s not that. It’s that I know it’s true.” His voice hitches on the last word. The pain in the dreams is always excruciating, but the waking up is always worse.
Tycho sits back down and sighs against the weight in his chest, leaning his forearms on his thighs.
“No one knows what they’ll do until they’re in a situation like that. I’m no perfect hero - if anyone knows that, it’s you. I can barely even put what happened into words.”
“I don’t know how you came back from it. After everything they put you through. I got a hero’s welcome and look at me.” Wes holds out his hands to show a slight tremble.
“You essentially died, Wes. I wouldn’t know how to come back from that.”
Wes turns to him, his face cast in stark shadow. “I don’t know that I did.”
And that’s a pain that Tycho feels all too deeply. The pain of not knowing yourself, of not trusting yourself. Of feeling like every time a friend put faith in you that you were quietly betraying him somehow.
His friends, his true friends, had given their trust so freely; it had taken much longer to learn to trust in himself again. He swallows hard against the void of words. There’s really nothing that can be said except…
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Tycho pulls the other man to his feet. They’re both soaked through to the bone, and it’s a cold, miserable trip back to Winter’s apartment.
All is quiet when Tycho gets the door open, but it doesn’t take long for her to appear in the doorway to the bedroom, wrapped in a light blue robe.
“Everything okay?” She glances between them, taking in their dripping, dirty clothing and the bruises on Janson’s knuckles.
“Getting there,” Tycho says, and gives her a look that says everything. Winter has been down in the trenches with him for years; she's been here before. Tycho leads Wes over to the couch while she disappears for a moment to bring out the medkit. In consideration of her line of work, it’s much better equipped than the usual household variety.
Winter sits on the couch next to Wes, and shoos Tycho off for a hot shower and a change of clothes. Wes watches as Tycho leans in to brush a kiss against her cheek before disappearing into the ‘fresher. There had been a time when Tycho had drawn back from even a pat on the shoulder. If Wes were honest, and not steeped in cheap alcohol and self-pity, he might have remembered that Tycho didn't exactly walk away from what he'd been through.
“He’s really okay, isn’t he?” Wes asks, tilting his head over to the closed door of the ‘fresher.
Winter pauses and looks up. Her eyes are so clear it feels like he could freeze and shatter in them. Then she smiles softly, and it lights up her face.
“Yeah. He is. And you will be too.”
And sitting with her, with friends close by, in from the cold and the dark… he can almost believe it.