Private Hangover: Family Edition

[Aver Brand]

“Rune,” she said with a tone that sounded like a patronizing pat on the cheek, “my memory has more holes than a Sith casus belli but I’m like ninety percent sure we fucked, so…”

Aver thought about saying that, anyway, but took pity on this whimpering pale starfish below her.

With a sigh, she stepped away to collect one of the many towels left behind on the deckchairs when the lounging tourists had fled the scene of the Great Splash. She gave some props to the gawkers that had remained just for… well, remaining. Wasn’t every day two cut-slash-ripped marble gods dropped into your resort pool from the twentieth story of your highly expensive hotel and then just walked out like it was an afternoon stroll.

Had these people NO SHAME, actually? Why was Rune getting on her case?

Fuuuuck, her headache tripled just thinking about the weeks it’d take to wipe all records of this incident off the holonet. She was gonna be paying out the nose for infochants, and then for assassins to have those infochants whacked…

Aver groaned at the sun, as if some kind of miracle would fall out of the sky. After the two of them, of course.

Having acquired an abandoned margarita as well, the betoweled mercenary plopped down next to the Shamalain and took a long, icy sip. De-fucking-licious.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

"No," Rune muttered back grumpily, baritone rumbling in his chest, "I would like to not talk. For five minutes."

He would like to not talk completely. In fact he'd like to just melt into a puddle and lose his conscious self to the catch drains built into the pool walkways. In fact, the less he talked the more he could focus on scrubbing his mind of the memory of Aver Brand riding him on the floor of a limousine looking like a fire-headed she-devil with spiders crawling over her skin.

After several long, drawn out minutes of him grousing and Aver sipping fruity, icy hair-of-the-dog into her hangover, he did finally push himself to sit up. For a moment he just sat there rubbing the heat from his eyes until he could open them without the sunlight burning his retinas into oblivion. Finally the man let his hands fall haplessly into his lap and he looked around, squinting through his own hangover into his growing confusion, "What the hell."

It was a broad statement rather than a question of any particular sort.

What. The. Hell.

Happened?

 

[Aver Brand]

Fine. Five minutes.

It was a long five minutes for two pale pieces of shit in the sun, but such was life. Aver idly wondered if her regeneration could outpace the tingle of sunburn on her tits. She then abandoned such heavy mental lifting in favor of sipping more of the blessedly cold cocktail. Rune whined and groaned and generally looked nothing like the man she’d fought beside while hunting down a rogue Sith Lord.

But that was okay, because Aver frankly didn’t either. The small solace against the roving eyes of the crowd – disheveled and wet and clearly working at least a dozen substances out of her system, this fucked up redhead could not be associated with that schutta on the cover of Badass Weekly.

"What the hell."

Aver loudly slurped on her second cocktail and splashed her feet through the water.

“Look.”

She delicately placed the empty class on the ferrocrete.

“The first thing I remember about… this,” whatever the fuck this was, “is… a cult.”

The word left her lips, but Aver could hardly believe what the fuck she was saying. Her memory was a blur of red and black and the occasional pulse of violent, vibrant taste and light.

“A… Sith cult, I guess. On a space station? I don’t fucking know?” Her aggressive shrug knocked the glass into the pool. “Anyway, pretty sure we… well, they ain’t cultin’ anymore, is what I’m saying.”

Was that where they got the massive stash of drugs in the suite? No, no, those were Zeltros brands on the counter. Oh, fuck.

“I… I don’t think that was even yesterday.” Aver groaned and finally glanced over at Rune. “What’s the last day you were sober?”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

A Sith Cult?

Rune cupped his face in his hands to steady the dull pounding within. His body still couldn't seem to catch up to the time-space-reality of his surroundings and he was feeling very out of sorts in every dimension possible. Wasn't that the tagline for a Spice line?

"What day..." he muttered to himself, trying to wrack his brain for memory beyond the fog of this extended jaunt and finding it a painful endeavor. Nothing easily came to mind from trying to hard working backward from nothing, so perhaps...

"The home on Coruscant..." his voice trailed, "...Ceto...I remember leaving Ceto to go to ...I don't remember where I was going, but-" he slowly wrung his hands down his face, fingers pulling at his skin, eyes shifting to the side to look at her, "there was a station."

But what day?

"What day ... is it?"

He did not even know that much.

 

[Aver Brand]

“Benduday.”

Apparently. So said the tablet she’d taken off the unconscious cop back in the suite. Aver, for her part, felt like the concept of linear time had shattered during their exciting little adventure, and she wasn’t sure where to begin with putting it back together.

“A station?” She chose to abandon her existential crisis in favor of the tidbit of information that leaked from the disheveled man beside her. “What kind of station?”

Hers? His? Something el— oh. Oh no.

Not one of those pop-up things?

“Was the name capitalized and missing all vowels, by any chance?” Please say it ain’t so, Rune. Also, “Why did you leave Ceto?”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

Those were definitely questions.

Rune's swimming brain decided they were definitely too many questions and summarily skipped the first three to focus on the last one. The station was a total blur to him anyway. Fuck if he could remember the name or what kind. She was lucky he remembered there was a station at all. He dropped his hands from his face and let his arms hang loosely over his knees while all the world around and between slowly spun about his axis of existence. A desire to puke again had slowly begun to rise.

"I ... I'm taking a sabbatical."

The galaxy had changed while his soul slumbered in a crystal for several centuries. A change he would have been well prepared to handle ... if it weren't for the fact that he was a greatly changed being as well.

"I need time to figure some things out..."

 

[Aver Brand]

This man was… incredibly frustrating. Anger and hangover bled into one massive pounding headache behind her eyes and she really couldn’t be held accountable for her actions if he kept giving non-answers and ignoring her fucking questions. Aver ground her teeth and let out an audible growl.

Some of their resort audience took a step back. You know, like slamming into the pool from the penthouse balcony wasn’t a clear enough sign they weren’t safe for life or anything. The mercenary shot the gawkers one of her finest glares, then turned it down a notch and flickered cool blue eyes on Rune.

“Suggestion: we take one of these fine ladies here back up to our room, you have a nice little drink, clear your head, and then we figure out what the fuck happened.” She tapped the tip of his nose, but, like, aggressively. “How’s that sound?”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

Rune turned a miserable grimace at the woman for the audacity of that suggestion. What did he look like? Some hapless, savage beast?

"No," he said firmly, then recalculated how much oomph he used with his diaphragm because it wasn't helping with the renewed need to vomit. The man shut his mouth, jaw clamping down to hold back the incoming wretch that was slowly slithering its way up his esophagus like an acidic grub. This was unfortunate because he had more to say on the matter, he'd just never get a good opportunity because ~

"You two!" It was a new set of resort enforcers arriving on the scene, this time four of them. "Don't move! You're coming in for questioning!"

Rune's eyes went wide at the surprise and he slapped a hand over his mouth. No. NO. Keep it down-

HUUURK.

Well at least he aimed away from Aver this time.

 

[Aver Brand]

Resort security. Of course. Why was she even considering hoping she might get some answers out of the man. The only thing coming out of Rune today was puke.

The glacial glare swiveled from the useless Shamalain to the newest addition to the many, many ails of the day. She stood from where the blond was tainting the pool, reveling in the jerky moment of hesitation to the enforcers’ proud march as they were faced with full frontal nudity in a PG-13 environment.

“My friend here is very ill. I think he caught something from one of your resort pleasure workers.” She smiled, all teeth. “How about you fuck back off to where you came from, and we can all forget about this little incident?”

A brief inspection of her nails later, Aver let her gaze caress the quartet of burly houks.

 

[Rune Shamalain]

"I don't think so," said one of the enforcers, "we have victim and witness reports of assault, battery, illegal substance abuse, and theft of corporate property."

The first three were not nearly as surprising as that last one. Rune ever so slowly leaned to splash his face with pool water, turning a dripping face over to the security team and then up at Aver, "What the fuck did we do?"

"That's what we're here to find out. Let's go," the team began moving forward, wary perhaps of Aver and her shimmering silver greek goddess body, but intent on taking them both in.

 

[Aver Brand]

“Theft of corporate property?” Aver parroted, feeling lost and dumb and not for the first time today. Fucking benders, man.

She eyed the advancing four houk, her body as relaxed as it could be after an uncounted number of nights of assault, battery, and illegal substance abuse. She’d bet good credits most of the abuse was on Rune, because did that boy ever have problems to work through, but the first two were likely mostly her fault.

“You know what. Sure,” Aver Brand said in a surprisingly non-violent turn of events. She was willing to postpone the slugfest in favor of actually scraping together some of the puzzle pieces that would fill the void in her memory.

“Just… be careful he doesn’t ruin your nice uniforms.” Cue grin. “It’s pretty bad.”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

An uncertain amount of time later.

There had been Sober Stims ... multiple for Rune. There had been a holding cell. Several hours, a few bottles of water, and one very long headache to sober up from. An interrogation for them both, separately, filtered in somewhere in between. Rune's memory was not playing ball and he spent much of his time in the interrogation room answering with I don't know.

He was laying on the floor when they brought Aver back, commiserating in his misery and sullen mood. Apparently he'd taken the liberty to feed from quite a few people over the last week, not just the girl in the bathroom of the condo suite. He didn't remember any others, though the struggle with the girl was starting to surface in his foggy mental images.

"So..." he spoke up without bothering to open his eyes - didn't need to, he was intimately familiar with the scent of Aver now ...and the cadence of her stride, "what did you steal?"

 

[Aver Brand]

“We stole the treasured pleasure yacht of one Penkpa Shassiljic. He’s very upset. The kind gentlemen here assured me we should be thanking them. He’s a dangerous crime boss, turns out.”

Aver stopped above the supine form of her third-favorite Shamalain. In a fortunate turn for his sanity, she’d put on clothes since they’d last seen each other. Security had trouble interrogating people with their tits out, apparently.

“He put out a hit out on two mocmox’a tapka sacan.” Holding cell benches were designed to foster back pain, not comfort, but Aver somehow made it work. “Rampaging night demons. Makes me think I should change my job title.”

She stretched out on the narrow strip of durasteel, dragging her body kicking and screaming from its stupor. “They tell you anything useful?”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

Rune had not been so fortunate in the wardrobe department. He was still shirtless, but he did have pants on at the very least, and they were his own pants to boot. Still a bit soggy from his prior swim and, as such, still rather uncomfortable to wear. Dress slacks were not made for pools, they were made for politicking and pontificating in offices. Or for looking positively prime.

He wasn't sure why his mind was dithering on consonance and he scowled at himself in disgust.

What was Aver saying? Rune caught about half of it. Too distracted by soggy slacks.

...stop.

"That my personal ship had been impounded for over two weeks back at a space station called ...plygind? Plygrind? I don't know, it was...oddly spelled without all the letters."

 

[Aver Brand]

A weak moan of horror echoed through the cell. She closed her eyes and banged her head on the cold bench. Maybe it would knock what she’d just heard out of her skull and render her blissfully ignorant.

It didn’t work, obviously, but Aver was nothing if not an optimist.

“Take it back,” she hissed as she swung her feet onto the duracrete floor. “We did not fucking go there.”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

"I can barely remember what we did two days ago, let alone two weeks," Rune replied from what he hoped would become the shallowest grave in the galaxy. Strike him dead, end his misery. There were worse ways to go ... like the Gulag, and he'd already done that.

"I do not even know if we did go there. I only know that my ship is there." But, much like his sister, curiosity would often get the best of him. He cracked open a bloodshot blue eye and looked to his present cellmate, "...why do you cringe?"

 

[Aver Brand]

With another, longer groan, Aver planted her head in her hands. A curtain of red hair fell forward to obscure her face, unruly and long after evading scissors for more than a week.

“I’m not having this conversation with you right now,” she spoke at long last, shoving off the bench to peer through the bars. They were only durasteel, and would bend easily for either of them. She wasn’t yet desperate enough, but the possibility was certainly on the horizon.

Going by the laundry list the officers had read out to her, it would hardly make a difference.

“What’s the plan, pretty boy? You gonna keep moping around or are you gonna help me get us out of here?”

Surely he wasn’t planning on sticking around and bearing out his sentence or something else along those stupidly stoic lines.

 

[Rune Shamalain]

If not now, then - no, you know what, never mind. He didn't care. They were in a cell and they would be here for Force-knew how much longer. Days. Weeks. Months. Hell, was he about to get incarcerated for this bender? The notion boggled his mind on a level he wasn't quite capable of putting to words. He'd been imprisoned by the Sith before and broken to their will - but their form of imprisonment was leagues above and away from anything Zeltros could throw at him.

Why, those bars were only durasteel and he could tie them in ribbons on a whim if he wanted. Rune half pondered sticking around and bearing out his sentence because it was no less than half of what he deserved. But then Aver had to go and ruin his commiserating. He shut his eye, twitched his nose, and frowned.

"My misery is the most miserable on cold duracrete floors." Actually, the coldness of the floor had been quite relieving on his forcefully sobered body. "What did you have in mind?"

He didn't really want to stay here. He'd get terribly bored.

 

[Aver Brand]

“Ooo-kay,” Aver intoned and turned on her heel with raised eyebrows. “Someone missed their calling as a Sith Lord brooding on the bridge of an SD.”

She leaned on the bars again, bouncing on her heels as she tested their strength. The more she entertained the idea, the more tempting it got. Wouldn’t be the first time in her lives she’d be staging a prison break. If you could even call it that. Baby’s first incarceration, more like.

“What did I have in mind?” Musing out loud, Aver wrapped her fingers around the steel keeping them from leaving the cell. “I got no interest in waiting on this stupid investigation. I need my ship and my extranet connection and then we can figure out what the fuck is this Shassiljic’s problem. And where we left his pleasure yacht, I guess.”

“But. We only know where your ship is at the moment. My thinking is, we maybe met up on that station. A week sounds about right for the black hole in my memory. So if your ship’s there, probably mine is too.”

“So.” The bars whined as she gently applied herself to their structural integrity. “We leave. We hitch a ride off this rock. Pick up our ships. Backtrace whatever clusterfuck this is.”

 

[Rune Shamalain]

"The Sith didn't like my hair." Despite the fact that his true father had also bore the same platinum locks and had held the title of Dark Lord of the Sith several hundred years ago, seemed the aesthetic didn't have staying power. They'd shaved him during his incarceration - a look he did not intend to repeat for any reason, anytime soon.

He listened to her plan and while it came across as sound, Rune wasn't entirely sure what the whole point of it all was. She was hellbent on remembering and he would have much rather left this entire blackout bender to the recesses of his lost memories. Either way, the floor was no longer cold and he was no longer under the influence. Seemed to him those were two appropriate reasons to vacate the premises.

With a grunt he pushed himself to his feet, noting with a grimace that he was still barefoot, and turned to assess her situation with the cell bars. Wasn't able to comment though as the sound and movement of Guards further down the block caught his attention, "Guards coming from the right. Two of them."