You're the worst. [Linna]

[Sarge Potteiger]

Five star hotel?

Check.

Hired help?

Check.

Bleeding on the hotel furniture while waiting for a Zeltron political genius to show up?

Check. Check. Check.

Said hired help was presently flustered as to what to do with the bleeding, dirty, soot covered man sitting on the couch, bleeding from multiple wounds. He had plenty of pouches, a ridiculously long knife, and the sort of glare that caused strokes if you met it.

Still, he'd needed to find Linna. It had taken a little doing, but he'd managed to track her down on a nearby planet and stop the bleeding just enough to show up like this.

Woman needed to keep her mouth shut.

So he waited.

And bled.

And scared the help by existing.

 

[Linna Beorht]

"There's a guy in your room, boss."

The Communications Director of Omega Pyre snorted. "I wish -- what? What kind of guy?"

"He's, uh, dirty. Think he's the Prex's bodyguard -- boss?"

The elevator door was already opening.

***

"The feth are you doing in my field office, Sarge? You know how much it costs to replace a carpet in a room like this? About four hundred and seventy credits. Do not ask me how I know that. Everyone out. Knock if the new numbers come in or Kerrigan loses another public relations campaign."

The room cleared. "The feth, Sarge."

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

Taking the sort of slow breath that implied bottled rage, which she'd no-doubt feel as a seething molten hot core of hate that rolled off of him in oppressive waves, he rose slowly and walked over to her, jaw working visibly. The moment the staff was gone, the hood came down.

His usually soft brown eyes were cold, whetted beskar.

"The feth...?", he begins slowly. "Let's start with you giving away who I am. Then we'll work from there.", he all but snarls as he stops an inch or two away from her.

Sarge was the sort of guy who, if he liked you, would yell and insult and swear at you. If he didn't like you, typically he did all that incredibly loudly.

If you were in immediate danger of harm... that's when he got quiet.

He could have whispered louder than he was talking right now.

 

[Linna Beorht]

There had been times -- embarrassing memories afterward, terrifying in the moment, like wetting yourself from fear -- when Linna's innate and ignored Force-sensitivity twitched without her consent. Papers rustled off the bed. Sarge didn't budge. Before she knew it, her back was against the door.

Between the injuries and the limited number of candidates involved, it didn't take a genius.

"Rach. The Mando. Got inside my head, got drunk-"

There were not many circumstances under which she was capable of running out of complete sentences, let alone words.

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

The bayonet was in his hand, all but tracing a line across her gut - not quite, but it was there. A pink nub appeared between his lips as his tongue traced their outline to wet them. "You do that again... you won't have a head.", he promises, lips trailing along her cheek and towards her ear to give her the whispered promise.

Definitely unhinged, somewhere. Right in the mind.

"Do you understand...?", he queries with a near tactile sugary sweetness.

 

[Linna Beorht]

Yield, yield, yield...

Hold.

A window blew open, somewhere behind him, and curtains rippled in the wind. Fire sparked behind Linna's eyes. "You owe me," she said. "You know how I could have framed the Tatooine report. You know what I could have told the bosses. Don't you fething talk to me with a knife about what a Sith Master did to my head while I was drunk."

And she shoved him. Zero combat training, yoga-class muscle mass -- but fear was the path to the Dark Side, and she sure wasn't thinking enough to lock that down.

It needed locking down.

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

"Then don't hang about the Sith.", he says, eyes boring into her with all the fire she'd come to expect from her. He'd not read the Tattooine report; at all, in fact. Mostly because reports meant nothing to him. They didn't concern the safety of the Prex or the Exarchs.

Suddenly, however, the winds of change swept over him. The knife dropped, a hand shot up to grab her by the scruff of her collar.

And then he kissed her.

Deeply.

Anger was passion, after all.

 

[Linna Beorht]

He'd kissed her before, of course -- when he still more or less thought she was Angel. And that had been the absolute opposite kind of kiss. This one had nothing to do with true love and everything to do with heart rate and bad judgment.

Linna was fine with that. She was not, however, fine with the knife. Sure, it was on the floor, but from the perspective of the tension in her gut, right below the hypothetical wound, the blade was still basically right there.

Last time, she'd told him to do what he had to do if it would help with what was certainly a bad case of PTSD. This time, she was feeling entirely too many things to settle on a course of action.

After a long, long minute, she pushed him back, or tried to. The Force-enhanced strength was, of course, gone. She wiped her mouth and met his eyes, breathing hard, her back against the closed door.

Ambiguous.

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

He'd expected a push back a lot sooner than that, or, he did in hindsight at least. Releasing her collar, they locked eyes for a moment or two as he sought to figure out what she was thinking. It wasn't a no, but it wasn't a yes. Hell it wasn't even a maybe.

He didn't even know anymore.

Instead, he raised a single inquisitive brow as he caught his breath.

 

[Linna Beorht]

Her eyes never left him as she stooped and picked up the knife. Nor did they leave him as she tossed the knife into a nearby wastebasket. Heart hammering, she forced her hands to unclench.

"This shirt ties up the back. I'm going to need a hand with it. And you tell nobody."

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

"Done. We'll have to fix me up after, though.", he says, dropping his cape and moving to give her a hand. He'd been about to go get the blade, then thought against it. Zeltron woman. Right in front of him. Yeah, can't say no to that.

And yes, he'd said 'we', not 'you'.

 

[Linna Beorht]

With a sigh that might have meant anything and probably did, she flooded the room with pheromones and faded the whole thing to black.

Later, she knelt beside him, surrounded by antiseptic and bandages, wrapping gauze around his shoulder.

"Hope you got him good, by the way. He's not the most complicated person to have around, but I always need to figure out who I am after I've been with him."

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

And Zeltron pheromones were still the sweetest thing he'd ever had screw with his mind.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, still naked, the man of scars and wiry muscle sat impassive as she made sure to wrap his wound snug and tight. "I made him work for it, that's about all I know. Force Users are annoyingly hard to damage when all they're doing is using the Force. Sabers I can deal with, the Force itself, not so much."

Lips quirking briefly, he took a slow breath and rubbed his palms together pensively. "Ya know, I could say the same for you, Doc." It was true. She brought out the worst in him. No one else made him act the way she did... and none of the ways she made him act were romantic in even the barest bones definition of the word.

 

[Linna Beorht]

Linna's mouth compressed into a thin line. "If you'd ever met his father...Ember Rekali was the most hypocritical Jedi Master ever. Untouchable, superior, always justified by his own judgment. Rach learned his arrogance young. Of course, he also manipulated a Sith god once, so there's that.

"If you ever meet him again...I really wouldn't mind if you killed him. Nobody should make me feel that way. When I make people re-evaluate their lives with a seduction or whatever, I'm doing it because I'm in control of me. I think Rach does it to feel in control of everything else."

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

"That sounds about right to me. I think the only way I'll ever kill him is if I can completely negate his Force power or have him so distracted with something else that its a textbook assassination.", he shrugs and immediately regrets it.

"I'd put money on you hangin' around him again. Your little spice addiction tells me that even if something's bad for you, you'll keep using it for pleasure."

He sighs and fights the urge to scratch the shrapnel wound on his leg. He hated shrapnel wounds. They always itched the most.

 

[Linna Beorht]

"Of course I'll see him again. He's good, but he's no drug. You were better," she said, matter-of-fact. "He has the hubris. It affects certain things.

"No." She stood and replaced her shirt. "I'll see him again because if he knows something's different, he'll come find me, and I've no doubt you could handle him but I wouldn't put the company at risk like that. And if the first thing he finds in my mind is you, well...I'd imagine he'll wait for you. He'll know that I'd tell you that he spends time on Mandalore with his wife, and prefers Toprawa for shagging Sith. He may even read this memory."

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

"All about him? Too confident to care? Yeah, I can see that." Sarge furrowed his brows, wondering what it was exactly she was playing at. Did she really want Rach dead, or was she trying to get Sarge offed?

Political games. How he hated them.

Then Sarge blinked.

"He's married...?"

 

[Linna Beorht]

Linna snorted.

"To the new Mandalore."

 

[Sarge Potteiger]

"Sacred Feth, what kind of horseshit is this?" The man stood abruptly, whether he was finished being bandaged or not, and retrieved not only his underwear but his blade. Putting the undergarments on, he sits back down again and runs his thumb up and down each side of the blade lightly.

His gaze sat, foxated, staring, right at the notch in the blade from the day before. "Speaking of women with questionable taste in men. You don't sleep with coworkers. Why me?"

 

[Linna Beorht]

She snorted again and slipped into her business skirt, then set about airing out the room. There would be no hiding this from her team, of course.

"Think back to that moment. You, me, the door, the knife. You really think I had a reason for that? But if you want to get specific -- you're the one person in this entire outfit who can absolutely, without question, keep a secret. And the fact that you reacted so strongly when Rach took such little bits of your secrets from me -- well, that tells me how seriously you take secrecy. My staff has been with me forever; they're professionals, not OP people, and they know how to keep their mouths shut. The rest of your outfit, our outfit, is still learning the game of government."

It was weak reasoning and full of loopholes, but it served to bolster the first part -- the part that said far too much about her.