[ 05 - CHAPTER FIVE ]

― darkness intrinsic, inherent, personified ―

The galaxy was filled with boys, boys that contrasted as abundantly as the types of clouds on Bespin. If a watchful eye were to look closely enough, it would see that beneath the layers of skin and sinew that covered these boys' bodies, beneath the past wounds and lacerations that had scarred over the passageways of their heart, each boy was made with a different type of stardust than the next.

It was like a fingerprint. The atoms of each person's soul was so delicately created, so carefully woven together that not one soul was identical to another. Even the term for two people that seemed indistinguishable at first glance - identical twins - was a hoax at its core. Twins were no exception to the one golden rule that rang true across the entire galaxy. They, too, had hearts that were laced with fragments from different stars.

There were boys whose souls were decorated with elegant gold engravings, the foliage of their being made up of only the purest substances known to the galaxy. These were the boys that would lead armies in their manhood. They would have the power to watch kingdoms rise out of suffering with a mere twitch of their hand, or their being would be accursed with the duty of razing entire planets until nothing remained but ash and dust.

There were boys whose souls had to be anchored to their body with iron nails and a hammer, because if it wasn't, it would fly away and leave its owner with naught, save for wrinkled and gasping cavities where the spirit once remained. There were boys who would stay boys forever - the starkid that bowed to no reality but the one they knitted in their own mind. These were Indirys' least favorite types, for their foolish and childish behavior tended to drive her mad.

And then there were boys like Boba Fett, who weren't really even boys anymore. Their lives were tales of tragedy and a forsaken childhood. A childhood that shred their innocence to pieces before they had a chance to whisper their goodbyes, and responsibilities that weighed so heavily atop their head that manhood no longer felt like a crown, but a weight to bear.

These were the boys that laughed as young women waited, starving, ravenous, and weary at their doorstep.

Indirys let out a huff of frustration, banging her foot against the clunky metal ship that sloped beneath her. The first time Boba had dumped her on an unfamiliar planet, she waited just past the beginnings of the ramp upon her return to his ship, but she hadn't bothered since. She simply refused to wait past the ramp on a planet like Cantonica.

It was a cruel and unforgiving planet, and any other time, she wouldn't have dared set foot on it. The Outer Rim territories were a land that even the Calrissians wouldn't dare to tread on - too many stories of inhuman governments and barbaris crime syndicates wafted from the corners of the Outer Rim. She'd been travelling with Boba for a week, and up until the dusty planet of Cantonica, he hadn't dared enter the furthest edges of the galaxy, either. It had been rather wise of him.

Suddenly, the entrance to Boba's ship popped open with a hiss, revealing the man in the Mandalorian armor. Indirys leaped inside the fallacious solace of his attack craft, grateful for the relief from the whirlwinds of sand that the outside environment had provided. She lifted a shoulder and brushed her face against it. The winds had blown with a vengeance while she'd collected credits for Boba - grains of sand had embedded themselves in Indirys' pores with every gust of wind she encountered, and she'd had to blink ceaselessly to avoid getting sand lodged in her eyes. The cool, still air of the slave ship was a refreshment, to say the least.

"You know," Indirys quipped once Boba began to drag her back to her cell. "That dark lord you serve probably won't be too happy if you keep his cargo from him any longer."

Of course, Indirys didn't really want Fett to turn her in to Vader. That was the worst case scenario for her current predicament. Yet, if she was ever going to escape the clutches of the irksome bounty hunter she resided under, something was going to have to change. She couldn't keep swallowing the trackers Boba fed her and expect to find an opportunity to escape. If her chance to slip past the reach of the Empire meant surviving a near miss of meeting Darth Vader, then so be it.

Alas, Boba Fett was silent. Rather than answering Indirys' banter with a comment of his own, he swung the door to her cell open and slammed the bars shut once he'd shoved her in.

Indirys swallowed a yelp. She stumbled into the nearest wall, unable to stop the momentum from Boba's rough jostling as her cheeks scraped against the concrete barrier. She held a hand to her face, wincing when she felt the abrasion of her freshly-filleted skin instead of the soft, smooth integument that usually lined her facial bones.

The bastard hadn't needed to push that hard.

The shredded skin on her cheek was, at this point, little more than just another injury to add to her list of wounds. Fett hadn't been gentle with her while she'd played the role of a prisoner, subject to his every whim as he tossed her into gambling rings for his gain, and she had a catalog of injuries to show for it.

"Smart remarks won't get you anywhere," a voice sounded from the inky shadows to Indirys' left, and the young girl rolled her eyes. At first, Tilar Mateecu had been a godsend. A precious piece of company that would give Indirys something to hold on to while she was locked away in a musty, grimy holding quarter. But now...now, Tilar either clamped her mouth shut or scolded Indirys for the words she let slip from her mouth. She had the personality of a flea.

Indirys slid to her rear, laying down on the paper-thin mattress she'd been provided with. "I didn't ask."

Over the course of a week, her melodious, soprano voice had dwindled down to a meager rasp. A rasp. Every time she managed to push her larynx past the pain it suffered with every word she spoke, every time she willed it to sing notes of defiance and congeniality, nothing escaped her chapped and bleeding lips but a chalky ghost of what her voice once was. She sounded like she was speaking with beads wedged in her throat.

Was that really what she was now? A vessel for beads that would one day clack against her teeth and bounce as they fell out of her mouth and onto the ground beneath her?

That, like all other matters of the fate that awaited her, remained to be seen.

Indirys let herself fall into a deep stupor, a sleep like she hadn't basked within in months, her only consolation the soft jingle in her pocket as she realized, Boba forgot to ask me for his credits.

◈◈◈

Indirys awoke to the sound of metal clanging against metal. To the feeling of rust flakes floating down to settle on the tip of her nose, to a pestilent itching sensation as Boba turned a key in the lock on her cage and even more flakes fell from the corroded cage bars.

"You have another city you want me to raid?" Indirys growled. She would not cower in order to stroke this armored man's ego - rather, she would bare her teeth and arch her spine so he could see the sort of feline she was. A tiger. Not a kitten.

No answer came from beneath Boba's mask, and with a sigh, Indirys lolled against the mat she'd fallen asleep on. During her restless slumber, the abrasive cloth of her undershirt had rolled back to leave her abdomen exposed to chilled, stale air. She huffed and pulled the hem of the shirt to meet her pants.

Mere minutes ago, her eyelids had been content fluttering in the space between wakefulness and comatose, but now, as Boba Fett was snapping a pair of stun cuffs around her wrist, she was more alert than she'd been in weeks. He'd never used stun cuffs on her before - at least, not when he'd sent her out to gamble and smuggle for him. What had possessed him to use them now?

The bounty hunter wrapped his fist around the binding and used it as leverage to tug her to her feet. A sharp hiss flew from between Indirys' gritted teeth and she thought, 'I could spit on his crinking mask right now - stain that polished eye slit with my own filthy saliva - and it would be worth every bit of punishment he would give'. And, with every jerk and wrench of the durasteel that encased her wrists, it took every ounce of willpower in the Calrissian girl's body for her not to spew saliva on his precious Mandalorian mask. He's placed the cuffs around a gash that was still healing. The gaping slice in her hickory skin had yet to close, seeing as how she'd only gotten the injury a few days prior when she'd nearly lost a hand in a confrontation with a Chagrian man(courtesy of Boba's orders, of course). Every movement of the stun cuffs hurt with a sort of fervor that Indirys had never known.

Boba paused his stride just outside Tilar's cell door, and Indirys could just make out the lines of her face as he snapped, "Don't think you've gotten out of this. I'm coming back for you."

Gotten out of what? Where exactly was Boba Fett taking his cargo this time? It only took a few more steps and a single gaze out the ship's gate for Indirys to realize: she should've fought to stay in her cell when she had the chance.

Cloud City. It was beautiful, but not when it was painted with the looming shadow of a hunter's ship.

Suddenly, when she watched over the fluffy stratosphere of her brother's city, the anticipation she usually felt at the sight was replaced with the roiling and flipping of her stomach's insides. Fett's presence here could not be to any avail.

As she peered through the visor of Boba's mask, she searched for any sign, any remnant that Boba might not be here to harm Lando. But what else could he be here for? Lando had seen him at the hushed Imperial meeting, alongside an arrangement of stormtroopers, generals, and Delorian, of all people. Shortly after that, he'd refused to comply with their commands and brushed aside their threats as simply as if they were a fly on his shoulder. His actions were bound to be reciprocated in a similar manner.

But why would she be here? Lando's paranoid conspiracies could not have possibly come to fruition.

Bile instantly rose in her throat, and she gripped her stomach to keep from regurgitating the little bread she'd eaten in the past week. Her blood began to race as miserable thought after miserable thought stumbled through the recesses of her mind like tumbleweeds, her skin itching with not rust, but the intuition that ghastly things were happening - and would happen - to Lando in the palace of his own kingdom. It seemed the Empire's claws could reach further than she'd ever anticipated. So far, in fact, that even a strong woman like Delorian had fallen to their treacherous grasp.

Boba's ship landed with a jostle on the domed palace in the sky, and not even the beautiful blue of the atmosphere that surrounded her could comfort Indirys. With a shake of her head, her now-tangled and greasy hair flying in her peripheral, she forced her conscience into the vigilant quadrants of her mind.

Miles beneath her lied the treasured prize of Lando Calrissian. The gleaming, coruscating kaleidoscope of squat houses and businesses, mixed in with the tresses of skyscrapers that only pierced the sky if you were unfortunate to be standing on the ground in a place like Cloud City. The blue artificial lighting each building contained was glowing in criss-cross lines along the edges of the tan walls, a sort of lighthouse, though Lando's city knew no body of water. It was one of the most entrancing places Indirys had ever seen, if only because it belonged to her own kin.

He'd won it all in a gambling match, true to the legacy the Calrissian name possessed. He'd built it up from the ground, and now Darth Vader had won his sister with something as convoluted as the loyalty of a bounty hunter.

The entrance to Cloud City's headquarters slid open, but instead of being greeted by the grandeur of Lando's wide-open arms, she was greeted by a mass of Imperial warriors. Boba Fett continued to march his prisoner closer to the white and black manifold of factory-issue uniform. The black hole that followed the Empire everywhere it went did not daunt him.

With every click Boba's boots made, with every scuff Indirys' compounded boots, a sound like the exhaust of a speeder grew louder in Indirys' ears. Whoosh, the repulsorlift fires up. Whoosh, the speeder flies across land, kicking up dirt in its stead.

Stormtroopers parted to let Boba pass, and Indirys was instantly met with the embodiment of darkness himself. The man whose cloak was night intrinsic, the darkest night the galaxy had ever known, and whose mask made Indirys' bones quake with deafening fear. It was the most frightening sight Indirys had ever laid her eyes on: the blackest hole in the universe standing stark against the white insides of Lando's fortress. Worst of all, Lando was nowhere in sight and, as far as Indirys knew, unaccounted for and in the hands of the evilest force stories had told of in millenia. All at once, the grinding of the stuncuffs against her unorthodox incisions didn't seem to matter quite so much.

"Indirys Calrissian," Darth Vader breathed. The living legend of all her childhood nightmares, manifest in the closest thing to home she had. "I've been expecting you."