#kallus: being told off by a droid in such a colorful way has made my day

[seth-shitposts]

Let's see I'm getting my thoughts in order here.

So.

I have a to write list that's going to keep us busy:

The last two (+bonus) chapters of Conversationalist

A mystery event piece

Jealousy, Ft Lando (🔞)

Edits to an unnamed NSFW piece that's been done I'm just nervous- (the rough draft is done, im going to go over it with one of our friends today i think)

Two chapters for a collab we're doing with a friend

Really any of the prompts sitting in our docs

And then also

A project we will start posting once Conversationalist is completed.

Originally was going to be a short one shot, but then we got attached.

So how it went down:

Seth read a rebel comic that followed an imperial droid and it was such a sad ending. He gave Alex the big ol eyes and said "we can't leave him out in the cold🥺🥺🥺"

To which Alex folded like a wet paper towel.

So now we're working on a side fic following 264, the courier droid that the ghost crew nabbed on lothal when searching for kanan that Chopper promptly pushed out the ghost.

Ima give you the sparknotes of the follow up comic.

Lil guy here, 264, was found in the exact spot the show left him by some local farmers. He decided to stay with them and help them around the farm. Until the empire showed up and arrested the farmers for stolen imperial equipment.

He was reassigned to an outpost on a frigid, inhospitable planet where he was miserable and continuously mistreated by the imperials. There, a captured Sabine Wren had been brought in and 264 recognized her immediately. He set her free and aided the ghost crew in escaping. He was found by the rebels, he could join them.

Zeb recognized the droid, but wasn't able to have much conversation before the ship got trapped in a tractor beam. 264 jumped off ship, choosing to stay behind to release them from the tractor beam so they could get away. The imperials went "What is wrong with this droid" and left him outside in a junk heap.

The comic ends with him thinking to himself that the rebels know where he is now, so he just has to wait for them.

---

Seth: and that makes me want to CRY. He's still out there in the cold!! 😭😭😭😭😭

Alex: so now we're writing a follow up to it about (fulcrum!)Kallus finding him and fixing him up.

Anyway @foxxxtransformer123 Guessed The Droid so here's 264's response to this post.

Also bold is translated, as Kallus understands the droid, that will be written.

"And why's that? You're one of the top agents in your field." The only reason why this agent would bother with this game is in the hope that 264 will lead him to the rebels. Maybe he can use the borrowed time he has to send the agent running in circles.  "Because I have also defected."  … …… "Agent, I have a very limited response bank, but I am doing the best I can to make this response special. Just for you." 264 hopes he's coming across as sarcastic as possible. "You are misleading me, into a cave of deceit. You must be desperate if you're going to create a ruse such as this one just to get me to tell you where those rebels are." The agent doesn't make any move  to stop 264, so he continues while he still has the ability to. "I was going to just send you on wild ghost chases with no inkling of success and revel in wasting your time with what little I have left, but frankly," 264 whirring indignantly, "I'm just so insulted that you thought I'd believe that. I may be cross wired and have no better place to rot than this scrap heap, but I am not the fool you think I am."  The agent looks so entertained by his spiel. And then the… the… 264 rattles in frustration at not having some foul word he can call this agent. Whatever. The agent laughs, utterly infuriating 264. 

The Renascence of 264 is going to be a multichap fic. First chapter is pretty much complete, just wanna brush over it again and finish outlining the plot of the fic before we choose to drop it, and I want to finish Conversationalist before we start dropping it. ^_^

[erinsusername]

Turn

Chaper 3 ~ Answers

Synopsis ~ Kallus tries to be clever and use his ISB skills on Roan and boy does it backfire.

Word Count ~ 4080

Rating ~ PG 13

AO3 link ~ https://archiveofourown.org/works/30074598/chapters/76504808

Roan spent the remainder of the trip back to Lothal pacing in the room she used to get ready in beforehand. She had tried breathing techniques to slow down the panic in her chest to little avail and finding various objects of specific colors only preoccupied her for a short while. Her mind was spinning at light speed and showed no signs of slowing down.

She eventually gave up and slid down to the floor pulling her knees to her chest as she sat. She closed her eyes and her brain immediately went into hyperdrive flashing vivid pictures in front of her memory’s eye in a rapid bombardment of hellish agony. They instantly shot open and she grabbed at her chest as she gasped loudly. The small room was slowly becoming smaller with each passing second.

She shook her head hard and threaded her fingers tightly into her hair. This wasn’t entirely his fault, but it was enough so that she wanted to hurt the Agent. To make him suffer like she was. It wasn’t fair, but then again it never was.

You should’ve broken another finger, she thought bitterly as she rubbed her scalp with her fingertips.

Roan leaned her head back against the hard wall behind her and let out a long broken sigh. You can’t think like that, girl, she thought as she hugged her knees to her chest again and set to recounting the tiles on the ceiling once more.

 A little over an hour later, she felt the ship enter Lothal’s atmosphere followed shortly by the soft thump of landing gears meeting with the hard ground below them. A soft knock came at the door and her heart froze.

“We’re back,” Kallus said quietly.

Roan waited until she finally heard the sound of his footsteps carry him away from the door before she slowly got up and peered out into the ship. She cautiously looked around and, once she had decided that he was gone, made her way to the opened boarding door. She had every intention of running to her bunk if she had to, but she was only about two meters off of the ramp when she heard him speak from behind her.

“Roan,” he said gently, smartly maintaining his distance.

She closed her eyes and took in a sharp breath before she turned to face him. His expression dropped heavily as soon as their eyes met.

He started to say something but hesitated before his shoulders fell and he looked down, “it happens to me too sometimes.”

She remained stoic for a few moments before she eventually lifted her chin at him, “good,” she said as coldly as she could muster before she turned and walked away.

 Roan was still wide-awake when her alarm went off the next morning. She reached over and swatted at it until it stopped before she rolled onto her back and stared despondently up at the ceiling with dry, irritated eyes. Every muscle was sore and her head was pounding. She felt like she had been hit by a speeder going at full throttle.

I wonder how long it would take them to find me if I went AWOL, she thought before she begrudgingly pulled herself up and walked over to the small sink in the corner of her room.

Hollow eyes stared back blankly at her. She looked older than she was and tired. Very tired. A lifetime of stress had that effect on people. Her shoulders dropped hard as she sighed loudly and splashed her face with cold water in a feeble attempt to snap herself out of her trance. It was going to be another long day.

She dressed quickly and made her way out and onto the lift at the end of the hallway. The elevator had only dropped a few levels before it stopped and the doors opened to Agent Kallus standing right in front of her.

Every muscle in her body instantly tensed. I can’t, she thought wearily as she went to step around him.

He reached his arm out sideways and put his hand against the inside wall stopping her before she could exit, “no.”

“Do not assume that you may tell me what to do,” she hissed as she looked out into the hallway that would offer her no means of escape.

He stepped on without moving his arm to let her pass, “take the next one,” he said to the group of people still waiting to get on behind him as he reached over and pushed the button to close the doors with the back of his other hand. His demeanor was outwardly authoritative, as always, but there was a subtle sense of stress in his voice. He hadn’t slept either.

Roan stood perfectly still and stared straight ahead. She could feel his gaze beating down on her like the heat from a thousand suns as he shuffled the cup he had been holding in his left hand. The smell of caf suddenly and blessedly overpowered the fragrance of his freshly washed skin that had filled the cabin when he forced his way on with her.

“You didn’t sleep,” he said with a quiet sigh.

  What do you care?

“Roan,” he started gently but stopped when she looked up at him.

She could feel the corners of her mouth pull down and back as her gaze darted back and forth across his face. Her eyes began to lightly glass over and she yanked her face back to the door in front of her before she let him see too much.

The air in the lift suddenly became too heavy and was pressing down all around her and no matter how hard she tried to breathe in she felt like her chest couldn’t fill with air. Kallus was an arm’s length away from her but she felt like she was somehow fully enveloped in his unwanted presence. She wanted to scream and cry and hit him and explode all at once.

“I’m sorry-“

“It’s fine,” she snapped as she reached over to restart the lift but he stepped in front of her hand before she could.

“No, it’s not,” he said sternly looking deep into her eyes.

“You’re not the first person to use me and you won’t be the last. I should’ve known better. That’s on me, not you.”

She watched him physically deflate at her words. She hadn’t meant to reveal so much and instantly berated herself in her mind as she turned back to face forward. She thoughtlessly bit at a loose piece of skin on her lip as he leaned back against a wall of the elevator in dismay.

She didn’t so much as breathe while he looked down at her for much longer than she wanted him to before he finally reached over and pushed the button to her level. The two rode in complete silence until a beep let them know they had reached her destination.

“Take this. It’s for you,” he begged more than he asked as he held out the cup and a small bowl of meiloorun pieces.

Roan looked at it and shook her head, “I don’t need anything from you.”

“Hate me. I deserve it, but you need to take care of yourself,” he said with feigned authority as he held them out in front of her, his eyes pleading for her to take them.

She shook her head in annoyance and snatched them away from him as the doors opened. It took every fiber of her being to not run away from him as she instead shakily walked away, carefully listening for the doors to close behind her before she could finally throw his unwanted offerings against the wall.

 Time wasn’t moving.

Luckily, she had plenty to keep her busy, but still, time wasn’t moving regardless of how much work she managed to finish. But, being steadily occupied at least kept her mind off of things and R3 had an innate ability to keep her grounded, so it could have been worse. It also could’ve been much better.

“Droids,” her comlink suddenly chirped.

Roan rolled her eyes hard and sighed before she responded, “this is Lieutenant Kalivoda.”

“You are needed for maintenance in Command Four. A droid is stuck in the wall,” a man’s voice snapped back before she finished speaking.

R3 let out a series of beeps and Roan had to shush him before she could respond. “I’m sorry, what exactly do you mean stuck in a wall,” she asked as she rubbed her right temple with her free hand.

The man on the other end huffed loudly, “just get up here and pull it out.”

The transmission went dead and Roan debated walking down to a hangar and leaving the planet before she pulled herself up from the disassembled droid she had been working on. She stretched hard and rubbed her tired eyes, the lack of sleep was starting to manifest itself physically and quickly.

“Ya wanna come with, buddy?” she asked her astromech as she put anything she thought she would need to free an unknown type of robot from an unknown type of wall into a toolbox.

R3 just spun his dome in a quick circle and rolled off into the back of the workshop.

“I’m gonna put a restraining bolt on you when I get back,” she yelled over her shoulder as she walked out.

There was a series of loud beeps and she couldn’t help but giggle to herself as she made her way up to C4.

 Two Stormtroopers were standing outside of the door when Roan approached, which meant a priority level meeting was taking place.

“I’m here to pull a droid out of a wall,” she said as confidently as she could.

The two just looked at each other before one asked, “You’re what exactly?”

Roan shrugged. “We do what we’re told,” she joked as the other spoke quietly into her comlink.

“Okay,” she said slowly as she stepped aside and pressed a button on the wall to open the door.

Roan stepped into the room and immediately hesitated. On the far side of the center logistics table sat Grand Moff Tarkin flanked by two officers that she was unfamiliar with and another that stood across from him but with his back to her. She took a step forward and a subtle but familiar scent suddenly played at her nose.

Before the thought had fully registered in her mind, Agent Kallus turned to face her, standing as tall as he could with his hands clasped firmly behind his back, as always.

“I believe that Lieutenant Lyste has something he would like to say to you,” he said sternly over his shoulder without taking his eyes off of Roan.

She waited a second before she looked from Kallus over to his side where a much smaller man stood behind him shifting his weight back and forth.

“I’d like to apologize for my curtness earlier. It was uncalled for.”

“It’s alright,” she lied as she looked down and saw what they had called about. A messenger droid’s data spike had somehow become lodged into the computer terminal of the logistics table and it was now stuck there.

“Hey, there,” she said calmly as she stepped around the distressed droid and sat down beside it. “What have you gotten yourself into here?”

She opened up the tool kit and began to rummage around, “how long have you been stuck here, little friend?”

“Not long,” it beeped in binary.

“Good, good. Did anything happen when you got stuck,” she asked quietly as the officers restarted their discussion above her. She reached over and hit a small green button on its dome before she began to analyze the situation further.

“What do you mean,” the droid asked as it looked from side to side.

“Like, any sort of power surge,” she began before she heard a voice above snap “is this going to take long?”

She looked up and opened her mouth to say something but Kallus tapped his finger hard against the side of the table three times and she stopped.

“I’m sure it won’t,” he intervened successfully on her behalf.

Roan shook her head slightly as she pulled out a small screwdriver, “I’m gonna remove your arm before I start to tear down the porthole. Just in case,” she whispered to the droid as the discussion above her began again.

A few seconds later the unit was freed and quickly rolled away from her and the table and took a place by the door facing the rest of the room. She smiled and winked at it as she set to removing the spike as quietly as she could.

The conversation between the Agent, Moff, and officers was regarding the rebel cell, known as the Spectres. She wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping, but she did pick up enough pieces to figure out that the four were working out the logistics of setting up an ambush near Geonosis.

Good luck, she thought as she pulled the front plate off of the terminal and took out a small light to look inside.

Roan quickly lost interest in the meeting, and of time itself, as she set to work removing the droid’s spike. Before she knew it, the men began filing out of the room, all of them but one that was.

She mentally and physically braced herself as the door closed and Kallus turned to look down at her.

“You didn’t eat,” he said flatly after an unreasonably long silence.

Roan felt her grip instinctively tighten around the wrench in her hand, “and how exactly did you know that? Are you spying on me now?”

“I could hear your stomach growling earlier,” he replied sarcastically as he turned and walked out of the room.

“The nerve on that one,” she said to the armless droid once she knew he was far enough away.

“He got really angry with the one that was rude to you before you came in,” the droid told her as it rolled up to inspect her progress.

“Well, that’s nice but it’s not what’s important now," she sighed as she sat back on her feet.

 A few minutes later Roan heard heavy footsteps and turned around just in time to watch Kallus enter the room.

She refused to acknowledge him and instead turned back to the spike that she almost had freed from the porthole.

He looked around somewhat confused for a second before he finally turned his attention squarely on her, “are you alone in here?”

She narrowed her eyes at him before she responded carefully, “yes. Why?”

“I thought I hea-, never mind, it’s not important,” Kallus said as he grabbed a chair from a corner and placed it in front of the door.

Roan’s fight or flight response immediately went into overdrive. “What are you doing,” she asked cautiously as she stood up.

“I’m not leaving until you eat this,” he said sternly as he held out a protein bar to her.

She looked at it and then up at him, “are you fucking kidding me right now?”

“I’ve got time,” he said simply, intending to leave no room for argument.

“Not from what I heard earlier, you don’t,” she retorted as she crossed her arms in front of her chest in defiance.

He simply looked down his nose at her as he held the bar out further.

Without taking her eyes away from his, she reached out and quickly slapped the inside of his wrist and the backside of his hand at the same time causing the bar to go flying across the room. Neither of them broke their gaze as it flew into a wall and fell to the floor.

She clasped her hands behind her back as she looked up and ever so slightly raised one corner of her mouth subtly indicating her pride in her actions, “you lost your intimidation factor when you took me on a date.”

“It wasn’t a date,” he said quickly, his voice pitched just slightly higher than normal.

“Would you rather I call it your failed mission? So many options,” she asked slightly tilting her head up at him and smiling as sweetly as she could muster.

“Why are you being like this?”

“Why are you here,” she countered hostilely.

“Because you aren’t taking care of yourself. You had a serious traumatic episode last night and you’ve obviously tried to compartmentalize it instead of dealing with it in a healthy way,” he said as he took a step toward her. She noticed that he very slightly reached out as he did but instantly pulled back upon realization.

“I was unaware that the Royal Imperial Academy offered electives in psychiatry,” Roan popped off as sarcastically as she could. His concern was becoming a nuisance.

His left brow raised ever so slightly at her remark, “Roan-,”

“Why do you even care?” she said far more harshly than she intended as she crossed her arms in front of her.

“Because I feel guilty,” he yelled.

“Good! You should,” she yelled back before she realized it. She stood frozen for a few seconds and she knew that he picked up on her hesitation.

Kallus sighed slightly as he walked over and picked up the protein bar. He stood facing away from her for a second before he turned back and walked to the door. He tossed the bar into her tool kit and then moved the chair back to the corner.

“Was that the first time you ever killed someone,” he asked quietly.

“I am not talking to you about this,” she hissed as she turned and sat back down at the terminal.

“You don’t belong here,” he said in a low voice as he sat in the chair.

Roan’s blood ran cold, what the hell?

He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and interlaced his fingers, “there were almost two hundred people on that yacht last night and you were the only person that reacted negatively to the decraniated slaves. You had a full-blown panic attack after you killed a man in self-defense. These are things that the academies arduously work out of people and they do it for a reason.”

“Well, I guess now you know why I work with droids then,” she said around the flashlight that she held placed in her teeth as she worked to remove a screw from deep inside the terminal socket. She had decided that perhaps ignoring him would make him leave, but it was beginning to look like that wasn’t going to be the case after all. Nuisance.

He sat quietly for a few seconds, “the Empire has a way of stripping people of their humanity. It makes the job easier,” he finally said almost despondently.

“Yeah, is that how you sleep at night then,” she asked without looking at him.

“I don’t sleep actually.”

“Have you tried not doing things like razing refugee camps? I feel like that’s a good start,” she asked sarcastically as she looked over at him.

She wasn’t expecting the look of remorse that sat heavily in his eyes.

He’s good, she thought.

He sighed heavily, “I was under direct order from Lord Vader himself.”

A chill shot down Roan’s spine and she could only stare at him.

“What would you have done in that situation? Told him no,” the Agent asked her quietly.

“I don’t do hypotheticals,” she said shortly as she turned back and pulled a small screw out of the terminal and placed it on a magnetic strip at her feet.

“Humor me. You’re obviously still a decent person. What would you have done,” he asked curiously.

“Left the room when it was obvious that I wasn’t wanted there,” she said while examining the porthole as she twisted at the droid’s spike gently.

“Dammit, Roan,” he yelled as he got up and stormed over to where she was sitting. He reached down, grabbed the spike, and turned it a full three hundred and sixty degrees before he yanked it out and threw it to the ground at her feet.

He was absolutely irate with her at this point.

“You can talk to me about it or I can have you placed on an involuntary hold,” he threatened darkly. “I’ve seen what things like this do to people and I don’t want to see it happen to you too. Especially if I’m to blame.”

Roan looked at the spike and then slowly stood up and stepped over to face him. His brow was furrowed ever so slightly and she would bet her life that he didn’t realize that the leather of his gloves made as much sound as it did when he stretched and retracted his fingers, which she now determined had to be a subconscious nervous tick. His breathing was slow but shallow and when he blinked his light hazel eyes the movement was slower than normal reflex.

His fear is genuine.

She stared deep into his eyes for a few long seconds before she finally conceded, “fine.”

His body language relaxed immediately and he let out a long breath, “good, where would you like to begin?”

Roan shrugged as she walked over and sat in the chair, “I don’t know. I would assume you call medical and let them know you have a concern.” She kicked her right leg over her left and placed her hands on her knee. “I don’t know how you’re going to explain away that you took a date on a mission and almost got her killed twice and you now think she might be having some problems dealing with it.”

“I’m not fucking playing, Roan,” Kallus yelled.

He began to step toward her but she jumped up and came at him first. He instinctively took a step backward from the surprise of how fast she moved. In the blink of an eye, she was in his face.

“No, Agent, I am not playing,” she growled up at him.

Kallus grabbed her left arm and quickly pulled her into him. Roan went to swing with her right but he caught her wrist and pulled it into his shoulder. He leaned down into her ear, his facial hair grazing softly against her skin as he did, and whispered, “no one saw you leave, Irys.”

Her stomach instantly sank. He was right, the hangar was empty when they left and returned, and he admitted that Boom had cut the security recordings on the yacht when they were in Cep’s private residence.

She sighed heavily and Kallus slightly loosened his grip on her arms. He looked down at her anxiously and she could somehow sense that it was sincere. He hadn’t put her in danger on purpose and judging by his actions he was desperate to rectify the situation for both her and himself, he was just really bad at differentiating when to be an Agent and when to be a man.

“I don’t want to do that to you. I just want to make sure that you’ll be alright,” he whispered without letting her go.

She looked up at him and his eyes softened as soon as they met hers. The tension in his shoulders released and his face, still mere centimeters from hers relaxed. They stood together, close enough that she knew he could feel her heart pounding in her chest. After a long few seconds, she felt his thumb run slowly and deliberately across the back of her left hand. In what she could only assume was a moment of sheer bravery or utter stupidity, his hand slid from grasping her upper arm to holding her upper back. His touch was soft and warm and inviting. Her eyes instinctively fluttered closed at the motion and her breath caught deep inside of her.

She leaned into his ear close enough that her chest pushed slightly into his escalating the interaction into the stratosphere, ‘tell me about Lasan.”

He instantly let go of her and took a step back. His eyes went dark and his body rigid. The betrayal read on his face like an open book that the simplest of minds could easily interpret.

It felt like someone had sucked the air out of the room and replaced it with a raging radioactive inferno, as was her intention.

“Maybe you do belong here,” he said quietly as he turned and left the room.