Flyboy
Corellia, The Two-Shot Cantina
Corellia to Coruscant.
Coruscant to Duro.
Duro to Fondor.
Fondor to Corellia.
Round trip, round trip, round trip. Smuggling was good business. He'd done that run four days in a row. Not a lot of sleep, and a healthy chunk of change for getting all that past the who's-who of galactic security.
He spent a lot of it on drugs and booze. High-grade stuff. Didn't cheap out. He didn't have money anymore. Didn't have to worry about it, either. He was living life on the razor's edge now, and spending money felt better than keeping it.
He ran a finger over a faded spot on his empty left hand.
And he was one of the best pilots, if not the best pilots in the galaxy. And smugglers needed protection. Long-routes often involved not just lightspeed, but sublight runs. Sublight runs meant danger. Meant spotting. Even running the best stealth tech in the galaxy, as often smugglers did, getting past a patrol wasn't just dodging sensors. Sometimes, it involved things like, making sure a passing Sith patrol didn't do something stupid, like for example- look out the window.
Sometimes it meant that you had to fight, protect, fly, dodge. And with a stolen former Revenant Squadron X-wing, Wedge was back up to his old-tricks. The Alliance fell apart, and it was all too easy to get one past blockades, and the parts and support materials in a container off Coruscant. Coruscant was easy, too easy to get stuff off of. The space around it? Not so much. Smugglers from all over wanted a piece of the anti-Sith pie. People wanted things.
Glitterstim. Guns. Escapees. Armor. Modules. Cybernetic parts. The works. Wedge had protected them all, the actual smuggling was left to other people. He was just hired help. He, however, was in-between runs. And depending on how you looked at it, he was sitting at the bar for either the past five minutes since he walked in, or the past two weeks in general. He didn't deal with it well-
And he didn't want to. He wanted to fly, fly fast. But there wasn't a war, and the Republic was stained. He was cast out, anyways. He belonged on the fringes of space now, running, fighting. He was making good money and making good another good name for himself. War hero turned rebel. It made for good story, if he lived to tell it later. He took a long drag of his cigarette, glitterstim still in his system. He looked up, colors swirling, words in the distant advertisement and reports on the screens still hazy to look at. Alcohol made the effect of glitterstim last longer, go further, longer.
He needed it now.
His communicator bleeped. He had a rendezvous in about.... forty five minutes. In-person meeting only. He didn't do any blind jobs. He was able to sniff out spies and ne'er-do-wells pretty easily nowadays. Only once, someone tried. Smugglers had a way of speaking, a way of thinking, a way of doing things. You either had it, or you didn't. Corellia was the home of them, practically speaking. A planet full of rebels.
Wedge fit right in.
He rolled the cigarette between his fingers, watching the colors swirl on the wall. Forty-five minutes to his next meeting. His next distraction. If he could keep himself busy for the next forty-five minutes, maybe he wouldn't try and fly his X-wing into an asteroid anytime soon. Time would tell. The runs gave him a semblance of purpose. Of hope, that things would improve.
Hope was a dangerous little thing.