Private Slow West

[Belok Karr]

His armour wasn't made for squeezing into tight spaces. It was components and beskar plates over the armor weave. Not too bulky, but still added to his frame.

"Their power? You're going to take down the shields to give us a jump start. I do not want my ship full of holes...slicer...look what is your name?"

Despite his complaints he was still doing exactly as he was told. There was scant little in the shields between them and a death so quick that they probably wouldn't even feel it. His heart raced, but his hands remained steady.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

While she worked, Lierra couldn't help but wonder why her name was now so suddenly important. Her gaze darted briefly to Tadgh's face, tersely answering him with, "Lyla."

If he was watching her work, he'd notice that she was only prepping the different power cables for disconnection.

"No, you're going to have your Droid force an override of the hyperdrive at the same time I disable and redirect the shields. We'll jump before they can hit us." She explained a moment later.

 

[Belok Karr]

"Crap, Dee did you hear that?" Tadgh shouted out of the pit.

"I did and I do not advise it. However, I do not have a better plan to advise on at this time."

Tadgh felt another flutter of fear. He did not like things being so out of his control. All he could do was pass her tools as the ship took a pounding.

"Ready?" he asked, knowing she wasn't.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

She noticed that the mandalorian didn't offer his own name in return, but the thought was pushed aside -- she had far more important things to worry about. In essence, she was rewiring a bomb and telling someone to flip the switch without proper testing.

"Gimme a sec..." She muttered under her breath.

One last cable was prepped and she wrapped her fingers around it, waiting. In her mind, she was counting and waiting for a break in the bombardment that would indicate the fighters were coming back around for another pass. Though, she didn't not convey this information to Tadgh as she was too busy concentrating.

As Glen called out that the remaining fighters were doubling back, Lyla was already yanking the cords free. An alarm blared throughout the ship, indicating that the shields had just shut down unexpectedly. At least, it was unexpected for the ship systems, but not for the slicer.

She was still counting, but this time she was counting down in a low mumble. "Four..."

Lyla grabbed the utility wrench from Tadgh's hand and rushed around behind him, frantically plugging the cables into place. "Three..."

She cinched down the vital connectors with the wrench. "Two..." Her voice sounded strained.

Just as she got the last cable in place, she heard Glen call out once more and felt the shudder as he opened fire on the fighters once they were back in his field of view.

"One! Punch it!" She cried out, still bolting the last connector into place.

 

[Belok Karr]

His heart was in his throat when she pulled cables. She was leaving them defenceless. Tadgh had no real idea if this woman was choosing a sensible plan or not. Dee didn't see a better option and that meant that Tadgh didn't either.

Within the small pit he turned to face her, watching her work. He had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Tadgh was doing some quick mental maths. Keeping the ship running was expensive. Hiring another member of crew took a cut out of his profits, but he had needed an engineer for years. Having a slicer to track down targets would open up a lot of opportunities.

He braced his hands behind him as she called out. A low whine was followed by tha shift in perception as they tore a hole in reality and launched the vessel into hyperspace. The whole ship juddered and they both fell backwards. His armour couldn't have been comfortable on her back, but he wrapped a hand around her waist to stop her from falling.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

Stumbling back into the mandalorian's armored chest felt exactly the same as if she'd collided with the wall. The only difference, was that the wall was holding her in place with an arm wrapped around her.

Lyla gave a nervous chuckle, tucking her red curls behind her ear. "It worked. Thank the stars."

For a moment too long, she stayed leaning into Tadgh for support, and she blushed when she remembered that his chest plate wasn't the wall of the cramped crawl space.

"Sorry, lost my footing..." She mumbled an awkward apology and stepped forward.

"But uhm... Thanks." She added with a sheepish smile.

 

[Belok Karr]

"It's...fine..." he replied.

"Dee! Are we clear?" Tadgh called out.

"Those TIE fighters were not hyperspace capable. The destroyer deployed troops so is unlikely to give pursuit."

"Wooo!" came Glenn's shout from the turret.

"He is...excitable," Tadgh apologised. "Want a boost up?"

 

[Lyla Emerson]

Lyla smiled when she heard Glenn's whoop of excitement echo through the halls. It helped to ease the tension of the moment and she expelled a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "Yeah, my leg's a bit dodgy..."

Before she took him up on his offer to help her up, however, she took a few brief moments to make sure her work was solidly connected and wouldn't disengage mid-flight. The last thing anyone on board wanted was for them to suddenly impact the side of a moon. Once she was finished, she turned back to Tadgh, waiting for him to put his hands together so that he could help lift her out of the maintenance shaft.

She grunted softly as the mandalorian easily hefted her up and then she turned back, kneeling down to take the toolbag from him so that he could climb out as well.

 

[Belok Karr]

Tadgh pulled himself up and collected his helmet. Some of the more orthodox mandalorian believed in never showing your face to anyone. He wore it at all times outside of his own ship, his home.

"Glen, make sure the prisoner is secure. Dee keep me updated, heading to the med bay," he called out. Calling it the medbay, when it was a bed inside a room you couldn't swing a cat inside, was a bit of a stretch. They did have medical supplies. It went with the territory.

"We should work out how this mess got so tangled up and where you want to be in the galaxy?" he offered Lyla.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

Lyla followed after Tadgh as he led her through the ship to the rather humble medical bay. It seemed the ship did not have a medical professional on board, she gathered from the sparse setting.

Cautiously, she sat down on the edge of the bed, resting her hands in her lap.

"Well, for starters, I imagine it got tangled up because my captain was drunk in the cantina. He has a bad habit of... Running his mouth. Someone likely got wind that something was up. That, or he sold us out... Either option isn't beyond him." She explained grimly, shaking her head.

The second part of his question was harder to answer. All she could manage was a slight shrug. "I don't really have anywhere to go. So... Wherever you decide to drop me off, I guess."

 

[Belok Karr]

"Sit back, let me look at that leg," he instructed in a brusque manner. Tadgh slid open a drawer and pulled out some scissors.

"You got another job lined up or anything?" he asked. Tadgh placed a bacta spray on the edge of the bed next to her feet and looked at the wound.

It had glanced, but in some ways that was worse. The bolt had burned away her skin cross the outside of her thigh. It must have hurt like hell to keep moving. Tadgh turned around to find a painkiller before he tried to removed the fabric around the burn.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

Lyla awkwardly clasped her hands together over her belly as Tadgh cut away the fabric from around her wound. Adrenaline was certainly effective when it came to ignoring pain, but that was rapidly fading away -- leaving her drained, sore, and exhausted.

She took a sharp breath in discomfort as he worked, then closed her eyes and turned her head to the side. She hated pain.

"No, I don't... I didn't plan on losing the crew in the job, y'know?" Lyla explained in a soft voice, a burdensome sigh ushered from her lips. Their deaths weighed on her now that she had time to process what happened, that much was clear.

"Guess I'll have to figure something out."

 

[Belok Karr]

Lyla Emerson

"Hmm. I'm sorry about that," he said. Tadgh had thought of her options going forward. He hadn't thought about the fact that she'd lost her entire crew.

"Were you close to them?" he asked. He was starting to seem less of a mandalorian behind his helmet and more like another human being. It was a slow transition.

The spray hissed as he waved it over the exposed skin. It was a mix of bacta and painkiller. He waited a few moments before poking her with metal gripped.

"Feel that?"

 

[Lyla Emerson]

"I was friends with the pilot." She said quietly, shaking her head with a remorseful expression. "He deserved better than what he got."

She sucked in a quick breath when she felt the cool spray hit her leg. It was so much painful as it was startling, enough of a distraction to take her mind off things.

One hand moved to tuck a few of her curls behind her ear, biting her bottom lip.

"I feel the pressure, not any pain though." Lyla answered, meeting Tadgh's gaze for what felt like the first time. It was hard to feel like you were looking someone in the eye when they were wearing a helmet.

"Thank you, though. You didn't have to bring me along, most folks would have just left me."

 

[Belok Karr]

"You were on our side," Tadgh replied. He didn't like to think that people would leave an ally behind in the situation. He wouldn't have abandoned the job for her, but she helped during their escape.

"Didn't think any of us were getting out for a while. Stormtroopers in the streets right as we made our move as well as all the rodian's friends trying to stop us."

Tadgh cut as much fabric away from the wound as he could, but a few bits of burned fabric had to be pulled away with tweezers. It looked as if it would have hurt a lot without any painkillers.

"If we get him back you'll get your share of course," Tadgh said as he reached for a bacta latch and gauze.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

She grimaced slightly as he pulled the charred fabric from equally charred flesh. It should have hurt far worse than it did, but the medicationTadgh had given her helped with the pain.

"You don't hear that very often in this line of work." She mused after a moment, raising her gaze from her wounded leg to meet his own.

Now that they weren't fighting and running from their lives, or scrambling to patch a hyperdrive... She could appreciate the Mandalorian's strikingly handsome features. Not that she was openly gawking at him or anything, the slicer had more sense than that. The distraction only lasted for a few moments, before she was reminded of her predicament.

Losing friends in this career field wasn't uncommon... But it still hurt just the same. She was a slicer, not a soldier or warrior. Computers and ship engineering were her realm, not battlefields. It was more painful lose someone she cared about than taking the shot to the leg. Her wound would heal, the lives lost would not.

Lyla hated pain. It was a shame that it had a way of constantly creeping into her life.

"Thanks... Could I forward Oriban's share to his family? I don't want them to go without, especially after what happened..." She asked is a low voice, dropping her eyes down to her hands that rested in her lap.

 

[Belok Karr]

Tadgh liked to feel he did the right thing by others. He did also like to patch up new holes in the Azimuth too. Sometimes he did not get to do both. Always compromise when you lived like this.

"I'll see that it's sent as soon as we can," he said truthful.

"This might hurt anyway," he apologised before layed the gauze across her leg. It was filled with both antiseptic and a particular blend of bacta for burns. Blaster wounds were too common in his line of work.

"I'm going to cut the rest of the leg off these and bind the wound, unless you really want to save these?"

 

[Lyla Emerson]

She didn't have a chance to ask him to clarify what he meant, before he pressed the treated gauze to the wound. Even though he'd used a numbing medication, the ointment in the bandage still stung and she flinched as the fabric was pressed to the seared flesh.

One eyes squeezed shut, gritting her teeth together, she answered his question about the pants.

"It's fine... I can always buy new ones." Since he was the one treating her, she quickly realized that the crew was lacking a medic. What else were they short on, she wondered.

Lyla managed a quiet chuckle, shaking her head. A few strands of red curls fell back into her face from the movement.

"Better to lose the pants than the entire leg, yeah?" She jested with a sardonic smile.

 

[Belok Karr]

"Well, more like having the gauze fall off and then trying to take them off over the wound," he replied.

Tadgh tugged at the fabric. He only had some basic scissors, not the angled, medical kind. It was Awkward work to cut off the leg of the pants above the wound. Away from the battlefield, it was impossible not to feel deeply awkward about it to. Bringing the fabric down and pulled it over her boot brought to mind just how long her legs were.

"If you wouldn't mind, putting a hand on this," he asked, pointing to the patch. Now there was a slightly flush to his cheeks and for the first time he slightly stammered over his words. He pulled a length of tape from the roll to start taping it down.

 

[Lyla Emerson]

If Lyla noticed the flush in Tadgh's cheeks or the stammer in his voice, she didn't comment on either. He was probably just coming down from all the adrenaline, she reasoned.

She kept her hand pressed against the bandage as he'd asked. Her eyes turned to the side and she chewed the inside of the cheek while he worked.

"Don't want to sound like a broken record but... Thanks again." She said with a quiet chuckle once he'd finished taping her leg.