Private In The Air Tonight

[Dagon Kaze]

THAT SIDE OF TOWN,
D E N O N

tune​

After hitting a crucial shipment of the Razorback gang's drugs some time ago, Dagon returned to Denon to team up with Yula once again in one final strike to rid the world of the malevolent thugs. It took a full week of arduous preparation and even then the sweep was near-lethal, coming out alive only by the skin of their teeth. Drained, wounded, trying to calm their paced breathing, the two sat leaning on a dirty wall in an even dirtier, abandoned back alley as rain poured down upon them and distant cop sirens echoed in the night.

Dagon tossed aside his torn and covered in blood gloves and exhaled a long air of relief. "Well, that was...something." his head cocked upwards welcoming the rain beating his face, washing away the sweat, and cooling off the adrenaline-induced warmth. After a long pause, he asked, "Worth it, wasn't it?" the rewarding feeling of busting the bad guys. Yeah, he still wanted to bring her into the fold of the New Jedi. In one form or another.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

Delivering a final blow to the Razorbacks hadn’t felt as good as she anticipated.

Sure, they got another drug-slinging gang off the streets, one known for pushing tainted spice to boot. But the encounter had kicked up a whole mess of feelings for Yula. Another encounter with Sable, another blaster held to her temple. She was up to facing the haughty Zeltron again—who had a new nose this time around—but something was different. In that moment, the muzzle of the gun grazed her skin and Yula swore she felt the slug pierce her skull. A splitting pain that wasn’t there, and a feeling like she was drowning.

Sable’s cruel smirk told it all. The schutta had done something to scramble her mind, revealing her hidden trump card of the Force. Yula felt like a fool, having her mind invaded so easily by that snake of a woman. She was unprepared, and the effects still lingered no matter how hard the rain tried to wash them away.

Resting on the inside pocket of her coat, her hand wrapped around a cylindrical tube. She fiddled with it, remembered who was next to her, then withdrew her hand.

“Drop in the bucket, I guess.”

Sith, spice, slavery—Yula believed that you’d never be free of them. The hunger for power and vices pervaded most corners of the galaxy, and you could chase it away as much as you wanted. It would always come back. There would always be a demand for an escape, for the unsettling, for desires to be fed.

“We should-“ She’d started to move, to get up and head back to the safe house where at least they could get dry, maybe have a meal of instant noodles. When she shifted, something clattered to the ground through the tear in her pocket.

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Drop in the bucket.

Dagon knew that feeling all too well, whether it was busting a crime outfit on Coruscant or liberating a world from the Sith. Always two more popped up in their place. But he had learned to persevere, to trust the process and to believe that victory was achieved only if the fighting spirit, the flame of hope, was kept alive. If someone dared to come take the Razorback's place, they would face the same justice. Again and again until the wrongdoers learned better.

A tumbling sound took his attention and he brought his head down to see its source. His gut tightened momentarily. The cylindrical tube was something far too familiar to the Jedi. He'd seen them by the hundreds in the bowels of Coruscant, but more importantly he had witnessed what they did to their users. The broken families, the shattered futures, the inevitable doom.

Dagon didn't move, only muttered sharply with a commanding tone, "Kick it away." his frown shifted from the tube to Yula.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

For a second, she thought that maybe he hadn’t noticed. That the rhythmic patter of rain would have drowned out the sharp rattle of glass against duracrete.

She was wrong. The hardness of his voice struck a chord with her, made her bristle in the ambient silence of the drizzle. A beat passed before she reached down, slipping two fingers around the body of the needle.

“You forgot.” She growled back in warning. “It’s not your business.”

It probably felt like a slap in the face, given how hard they’d worked to bust the same spice ring where she could have gotten it. But her problems, her vices that kept her from becoming something worse were not his battles to fight.

Yula went to place the syringe in her other pocket, hopefully without holes.

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

The frown turned to a scowl at her reply. The long night, illuminated by the scattered neon signs of the metropolis, threw shadows across his face. Without warning, Dagon’s hand snapped to seize hers by the wrist and pulling her towards him.

“I’m making it my damn business.” his voice rolled low, rumbling like a distant storm. Perhaps if he had not been exhausted, wounded and battered, his approach would’ve been different.

Alas.

“I’m done letting you kill yourself.” there was a barely audible hint of softness cracking through his tone.

Dagon well remembered the night they met and how she looked and felt lying on that bed convulsing, shivering, pale and drowned in sweat.

He knew it wasn’t too long from now before she’s lost the fight completely.

...and he couldn’t bear to witness that.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

A sharp gasp forced its way out of her lungs when Dagon suddenly grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. Strangely, the heat of a human touch, despite the exchange that led to it, was welcome against the chill of the rain and brutality they’d just faced.

For a snip of a second, the concern in his voice and his eyes lanced straight to her core. Dagon’s worry had always been so kind and controlled before now. But this—this was something raw and undiluted, and she felt exposed by his bold move and unyielding demeanor. He didn’t have the right, he didn—

They were locked in a stare, each as obstinate and steely as the other.

“You’re crossing a line!” Snapping, she yanked her wrist away, only to find it immobilized in his grasp. The syringe, still clasped in her fingers, served to magnify the tension that was breaking between them.

Yula lowered her head, glaring up at Dagon as she tried again to tug her wrist away. “Feth off with your savior complex, already. You don’t know what you’re getting into— meddling will do more harm than good, Dag.”

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Savior complex was indeed a factual descriptor for Dagon Kaze. What remained a mystery was whether it was driven by the Jedi dogma entrenched over the years of training and learning or a selfish pursuit to escape, run, from his own problems by saving others'. Master Sunstrider had definitely leaned on the latter, while his mentor - Master Varobalder - had vaguely implied it.

Maybe it was both. Maybe Dagon just refused to admit, or rather acknowledge, on which 'column' it leaned more.

And maybe he never would.

The altercation between the two simply grazed the surface of a deeper issue - it clearly shone light over each other's darker sides. The vindictive temper and noxious pride of Yula, borne out of numerous underlying problems, and Dagon's strong inclination to command, to take the reigns.

Rain continued to pour over their heads, drowning the two, as the dark clouds above emerged in their wrathful glares.

"I don't care what line I'm crossing, Yula. I'll cross it again and again until you stop." lightning flashed in his eyes, "You know damn well where all this ends."

and I don't want to see it happen to you.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

Yula’s jaw set, her teeth baring in an almost animalistic way.

“I should have lied to you that night.” Maybe he would have believed that she was sick. Maybe not. Either way, she’d ended up exposing a vulnerability that Dagon hadn’t forgotten, and now he had the audacity to act like her caretaker. “Then maybe you’d mind your own business.”

She tugged her wrist again, glaring into his bright blue eyes and marveling at how at one point, he’d looked at her with a measure of tenderness. Now he was firm, scolding even. If it came from a place of caring, Yula didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want him to care. Not this deeply, anyway.

One last time, she tried to yank her way out of his grasp. This attempt was more aggressive than the last, and the recoil sent the uncapped needle into the flesh of Dagon’s forearm. Not very deeply, and her thumb wasn’t anywhere near the plunger to depress the spice into his system, but it had startled her to the point where she finally dropped the syringe with a gasp.

“I….!” The fatigue of their day’s work suddenly became apparent, outlining her wide eyes with heavy creases.

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Maybe she really shouldn't have, maybe it was best if he had never known. But it was better that he did; better for both of them. Yula might not know it now, maybe never, but it wouldn't be the first time Dagon would sacrifice his trust with a friend over the greater good. A large part of him still justified his actions to trip into the Dark Side over Ziost to save his friend Kaska even if she would come to never trust him again. If this would be the same case, then so be it.

"If you can't handle this on your own--." he replied, voice as sharp as a knife. "--then I am making it my business."

His freed hand settled over the syringe, its needle stuck in his forearm, and he pressed the spice into his system. There was no calculated thinking on his end, one of the rare instances he went for the knee-jerk reaction. Maybe it was the fatigue, maybe it was to prove a point, maybe a combination of both.

There was nothing for a few moments before suddenly all the tension of the galaxy began to dissipate from his shoulders. Weightless, like a feather, as the grim world around him filled up with color. Color that wasn't supposed to be there. The wounds accumulated over the fight with the Razorbacks felt numb like they had never been there in the first place; if a bullet had pierced his skull now, he reckoned he would feel nothing. Warmth began to form in his guts and the cold drops of rain seemed to evaporate. Dagon's features softened, their sharpness abating to make way for the sudden rush of delirious euphoria. His awareness declined from its normal state but he still knew exactly what he had done; the only difference was - it didn't bother him. Everything was okay now.

The Jedi's eyes opened, a thin smile forcing itself on his face, as he looked at Yula. Their fight seemed to fade away as if it had happened eons ago. Something in the past that didn't matter, he only had the present and everything was okay. The prism through which he viewed the galaxy changed. Skewed to conceal all its flaws and only reveal what was pleasant.

And right now the pink-skinned Zeltron was looking extremely pleasant. The dumb smile widened as he spoke through the haze.

"Y'know, don't think I've said it before but you look damn fine, Yula." truths unrolled his tongue. He calmly took the needle of his arm and set the syringe to the side. He didn't move but his eyes were inviting.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

"If you can't handle this on your own--." he replied, voice as sharp as a knife. "--then I am making it my business."

Yula’s look of defiance shifted near-instantly to one of disbelief. Out of all the possible outcomes to being accidentally stuck with a needle, she never would have thought she’d witness Dagon reach over and depress the plunger of the syringe, forcing the spice into his system.

It made no sense to her. He’d been fighting to keep her off of the drug—was this his own brand of defiance? Was he trying to teach her a lesson? Or was this simply a lingering curiosity about what it was like to be high, to experience the vice that drew her to the needle over and over again.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. Yula watched, frozen, with an open-mouthed stare as Dagon settled. In the long minute that followed, his grip on her had slackened, his eyes softened their focus, and the tension melted from his muscles. Then he gazed at her with an all too familiar look. The sharp blue eyes that she figured were always judging her, punishing her, stared back in a haze of gentle ambivalence.

Kyra had looked at her that way on Ossus, high as a kite.

"Y'know, don't think I've said it before but you look damn fine, Yula."

The change in Dagon was startling. His edges had been blunted into something more lax, more agreeable, and very much not him. She hated it almost instantly.

Without realizing it, she'd raised a hand and slapped her open palm across his face, and if trying to rouse sobriety.

“What the feck is wrong with you, Dagon Kaze?!” She met his genial gaze with something almost as harsh as before, curbed with no small measure of surprise and an inkling of sadness. “Do you know what you just did? Do you expect this to be easy? This was never a fething joke, Dagon!”

She grabbed his arm, uncaring if her grip was too tight, and attempted to yank him upwards. “We need to get you to the safe house while you ride this out. Coming down won’t be fun.”

Maybe if this had happened back when they’d first met, she’d have laughed. Dagon wasn’t her business then, but since he’d insisted on butting into her own, she felt responsible for his state. Another casualty of her poor behavior.

“What the hell was going through your mind?”

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Women slap harder. That's a fact. Don't ask how, but it's true. She swatted sobriety back to existence - only for a moment - before his startled face reverted back to its previous lustful characteristics induced by the spice. Yula invoked his full name to no effect; he was no longer Dagon Kaze, at least not fully. Half of him represented the inner, utmost desires to bask in pleasantries of Dagon Kaze and the other, oddly, represented that of his childhood hero - Deputy Law, a holoflick persona - ex-marshal turned space cowboy/vigilante, fastest gun in the galaxy and all around galactic casanova.

Intoxication, after all, loosened lips and spoke truths otherwise left unsaid.

His mind filtered through the negative energy Yula unraveled and grasped at the littlest of details that his spiced up perspective could skew into something positive. Like when she grabbed his arm, right? That's a touch, that's connection, that's something worth exploring. All of that clearly evident on the dumb smirk growing wider by the second.

She met no resistance yanking her up and herding him towards the safe house.

"Oh, baby, don't you wanna know what's going through my mind right now, huh." a lot of good things. "You takin' me to your place already? Was a time we had dinner first, tsk."

Sobriety might take a bit.

He was in his own, artificially-created world.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

"Oh, baby, don't you wanna know what's going through my mind right now, huh."

“Baby?” Yula snorted in bemusement despite the odd tension of the situation, all of which was felt by her. “Guess we know what kind of junkie you are- spice makes you think with Little Dagon.”

They managed to make it to the safe house without incident, Dagon trailing behind Yula with that stupid doofy smile as she dragged him along. The safe house this time was different than the one before; a basement beneath an Atrisian style take-away on 4th.

“You,” she pushed him towards the couch, well aware of what his delusional mind was probably making of the situation. “Are going to sit here, and watch tv.” She flipped through the holostations before settling on something dramatic and tossed him the remote. Being alone in a room with a spiced-out Dagon wasn’t the ideal situation, but it was better than sitting in an alley or wandering the streets.

“I’ll go and get you something to eat. Just...stay here, Deputy Law.”

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Deputy Law was certainly going to stay here but most certainly not watch tv. He would most certainly do what Deputy Law did in episode 542, season 18. A masterstroke. A genius move only Deputy Law could pull and live to tell the tale.

Dagon?

With Yula's temper?

Maybe not.

Nonetheless, this was Deputy Law. Just better looking. Right there on the couch lying with his arm behind his head, the goofy smile unwavering. So when she came back with food (or not), she would find him there with nothing but a blanket.

Game-set-match. Deputy Law.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

“Oh, for feth’s sake Dagon.”

Yula stood at the threshold of the door, a small bowl of noodles in hand. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what was going on underneath the blankets, what with the naked torso and doofy grin.

That didn’t stop her from admiring the view for a hot second. He was attractive, after all, so why not look? Any further feelings she had on the matter had been snuffed out by the presence of spice flowing through his veins, and the distinct lack of the same condition in her.

For a moment, something in her wavered. She had an extra death stick or two hidden in the gaps of the exposed durcrete brick wall, and a bottle of liquor stowed beneath either the couch or the desk. One hit, or a few shots, and she’d be gone just enough to enjoy what he had to offer.

A few steps forward and she was standing above Dagon and his blanket. Without much forewarning, she poured the bowl of noodles over his head. Fortunately they had been lukewarm, a leftover meal from a customer who hadn’t arrived to pick up their takeaway.

Being the stone cold sober one sucked, she realized.

“Put on some pants, Deputy Dumbass.”

Or maybe take a cold shower.

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

She approached him. Slow steps. Prowling. Like a tigress. She couldn't possibly resist the temptation of Deputy Law now, could she? No chance. The ploy was working, the naked man was a masterstro-

"What the--" despite the delirium, it's hard to stay in-character when a bowl of suspicious noodles is flipped over your head. Nonetheless, sobriety only lasted a moment before the spice kicked in again. It was just him and her, and things were about to get spicy, he reckoned, as she grabbed him by the hand and took him to the bathroom. Clearly, not a vanilla girl.

Alas, what would've occurred in episode 542 of season 18 of Deputy Law did not really occur with Dagon Kaze. There was no steamy shower with a steamy Zeltron; only ice cold water and the solitude of the four walls she left him locked in. And the stench of noodles that made him scrub his flesh off to remove.

**

The colorful haze receded the moment Dagon turned the shower off. In its place - a head-splitting pain that made him lean on the wall in hurt. For the first time in his life he felt his connection to the Force strained to an extent that it physically hurt him. His guts felt as if they had been twisted in a knot trying to throw up but nothing coming out of it. The dizziness nearly threw him off his feet when he made his way slowly towards the door. He looked at the mirror to see a pallid mask and eyes drained of color, a face that for a moment he couldn't recognize as his.

His recollection of events was foggy at best but ultimately he was aware of what had transpired since he'd plunged the spice in his system. None of his stubbornness to justify his actions for the sake of Yula dared to resurface, they were pushed hard down within his mind as he struggled to fend off the crippling entropy of the spice's after-effects.

Dagon opened the door out of the bathroom and moved into the living room agonizingly slow until he needed to stop and lean on the wall with his hand. Briefly, he looked down at the floor trying to steady his vision and stop the world from spinning around him.

"Y-you got somethin' for a... headache?" Dagon forced himself to look up and utter at Yula. He was pulling all his will together to try and downplay the way he looked and felt. That he wasn't as bad as he looked.

In fact, he was probably worse.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

Laying on the couch, fully clothed and covered in a different blanket, Yula looked up from her holomag. She watched him shuffle across the room for a few paces, resting his head against the wall to try and steady the woozy feeling she knew would be hitting him right about now.

Seeing him like this brought no small sense of relief to Yula. The shower had done the trick to wash Deputy Law away, and now they’d be dealing with a new problem. Dagon was coming down.

Shifting to right herself upwards, she motioned him forward with one hand. “Sit,” She insisted, sliding a box of half-eaten fried rice on the coffee table away and grabbing a small white bottle that had sat behind it. “You’ll want to eat something with those if you can manage. If not, the nausea is worse.” She tossed him the pills, and they clattered off of eachother inside of the bottle.

Yula watched him patiently with a knowing gaze. She’d lost control of her temper with him earlier when she’d lashed out, and the guilt prickled her skin. But before that could be addressed, the elephant in the room needed to be broached.

“Why?” She asked him simply, tucking her feet beneath her and curling into the blanket. A few feet away, a laugh track on the latest holo series provided idle noise. “Was it worth it?”

Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Dagon avoided her gaze as he staggered forward to the couch. His footing was loose, each step more disbalanced than the previous and when he finally sat beside her it felt as if he had reached shore after a near death experience at sea. "Won't be the first time I force myself to eat." he muttered suppressing the groans trying to escape his lips. Who was he kidding so stubbornly?

"Thanks." he said when she passed him the pills. He ate one spoonful of the fried rice before he downed the pills and sat back on the couch, his eyes shut.

“Why?”

Oh no.

“Was it worth it?”

He breathed in and breathed out a long and deep torrent of air, then he finally looked her way.

“You tell me.” Dagon retorted, a frown slowly appearing on his brow. “Is it worth it?” the words were forced through the miasma of pain encompassing him physically and mentally. All of it to prove a point.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

“You tell me.”

“Is it worth it?”

She should have expected that.

Yula’s finger curled tightly into the blanket as she absorbed his…resentment? Whatever it was, it tickled her wrong. That, and this was stretching into a very long day.

“So that’s why you did it.” The words seemed to force their way out from behind the clench of her teeth, but they were easy enough to speak. “To punish me. To shame me.” Yula couldn’t look at him in that moment, her gaze instead drawing towards the tv. Her gaze was so unfocused that she couldn’t even make out the characters in the sitcom as they delivered one zinger after another to the sound of canned laughter.

“It felt good though, didn’t it?” Her head whipped back towards him, features contorted with no small amount of anger. “You seemed to think so. For a little while, all of your problems don’t seem that bad. And in a galaxy like this, it gets harder and harder to pass that up.”

Then it hits you like a brick wall. Addiction was a schutta.

“Don’t blame me for your stupid mistake.”

She nudged her blanketed foot towards the takeout box.

“Eat more than that.”

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Her anger began to stir again, to resurface. He could feel it in the slight crack of her voice and in the words she uttered. If he was to go that route, too, that knee-jerk, snappy route he knew he would lose. That was Yula's home turf. He had to even the playing field of the verbal duel that was starting to form. And the only way he could do that was play to his strengths. Rational, methodical, calculated. Ironically, that came with extreme easy thanks to the spice's draining after-effect. It had taken all of his energy just to fend off all the nasty symptoms.

The Jedi deliberately turned his head away from her and took another spoon of the fried rice, allowing silence to drop like a thick veil between them. Only the faux laughter from the tv and the sound of the spoon scratching the bottom of the bowl remained.

"Was a simple question; worth it - yes or no?"

Let her anger boil, let it all out.

And only then he could do what he did best.

Connect.

Yula Perl

 

[Yula Perl]

Yula stared at him, expecting him to yell back, an explanation, something. She made no move to hide her irritation, and Dagon, annoyingly enough, seemed to take it all in stride. Her anger with him and what he’d done went unacknowledged.

She hated that.

“That’s not a simple question.” Her nails clicked together, an angry habit. His calm demeanor only served to fuel her further. Wasn’t he angry with her? Upset? He had to have some sort of feeling. He didn’t willingly inject a drug into his system for no reason, and Dagon never seemed to do anything unless he had a reason. Whether that reason was good enough for her or not remained to be seen.

He should know by now whether it was worth it or not.

She turned to face him, dark hair streaking over the vibrant ire of her eyes.

“You pulled the trigger, not me. Take your holier-than-thou attitude and your pathogenic need to butt in, and get out.”

Dagon Kaze