Chapter Text
Eli didn’t have any pictures when he left.
His personal holodisc had only two photos in it. The first was of him and his parents the day he left for Myomar, baby-faced and nervous, all three of them holding up the Imperial flag he’d gotten when he enlisted. The second was of his graduation. He stood tall, not in his cadet uniform but in the proper dress uniform of an ensign, his shoulders stiff and his eyes already a little weary.
As his ship drifted toward Chiss space, Eli studied this photo the hardest. There was a limited range of movement. Eli himself stood stock-still, no motion at all except for the blink of his eyes and the tight shift of his throat as he swallowed. But behind him, other graduating ensigns milled about and greeted their families. A boy — Eli had forgotten his name, but they took orbital mechanics together — hugged his mother, held her tight. A woman he didn’t know bent down and scooped a small child into her arms. Old forgotten gossip came back to him. That kid in the corner got discharged after only a year for malingering. The one just behind Eli, smiling at a friend, was killed in a dogfight in the Mid Rim. And he remembered the exact moment his father took this picture so he knew that Thrawn was close by, could picture him all too clearly: his back straight and his features schooled, his hands clasped behind his back. Commanding and out-of-place and somehow still at ease among the humans who hated him.
Thrawn wasn’t in the photo.
In fact, Eli didn’t have any photos of Thrawn. He’d never thought to take one; even now, the idea of ambushing Thrawn with a camera embarrassed him a little. He tried to imagine himself approaching Thrawn in his office — no, snapping a candid shot on a mission — that mission they took through the swamps of Mimban. There was a moment where Thrawn stepped into the marsh and sank up to his thighs, and Eli — still young — had been just a little envious of how graceful Thrawn made it look, how unsurprised he was, how he pushed through the algae and cold water like it was nothing to him. He’d led the way with long, slow strides; taller than Eli by a good twelve inches, he’d carried both their knapsacks on his shoulders so they wouldn’t get wet, and if the weight bothered him, he didn’t show it. Halfway through the swamp, a heron lifted up from the reeds and flew over their heads with a sharp cry, and Thrawn lifted his chin to watch it go: his cheekbones so sharp, his blue lips parting, the glow of his eyes turned dim by the heron’s shadow. Sweat-damp hair fell over his forehead in an elegant tangle, his water-soaked uniform clung to his skin, spotted with lush green dots of pond scum, and a swamp fly buzzed around the shell of his ear, unnoticed, and Eli wished for nothing more than a recording rod so he could capture this moment: the cry of the heron, the twist of Thrawn’s head, the open curiosity in his eyes that made him look so young.
But Eli had no pictures of Thrawn.
None at all.
Every questis came equipped with a camera.
They were fascinating devices, really. There was none of the bulk and weight Eli expected from a datapad. The keys were tiny — hard to get used to, but quick and easy once he got the feel for them, especially with the lazy, sweeping style of typing that Chiss used. His questis fit in the palm of his hand; instead of a recording rod, it featured a small lens on the back casing. Subtle. Easy to take photos without being noticed.
Not that Eli was taking a lot of photos. They were forbidden on any Chiss ship of war; the cameras were automatically deactivated the moment a ship left the dock. In his quarters at night, Eli practiced his Cheunh calligraphy on the touch screen, his light-pen held delicately between middle finger and thumb the way Vah’nya showed him; he explored his questis’ storage, read downloaded reports on recent Chiss history, and every time he came across Thrawn’s name in a battle report, he got a little thrill.
Other times he popped into the server reserved for the sky-walkers and explored games designed for Chiss children, his curiosity ignited. He put a tap-click together, eyebrows furrowed, the pale light of his questis turning his skin almost blue. And in his head he tried to picture Thrawn as a child — small and thin like the sky-walkers, curled up in a narrow bed like Eli, an old-fashioned questis propped on his knee as he completed the puzzle in record time.
What did he look like as a child? It was hard to age him down, to paste that serious, studious expression on a child’s face. Idly, Eli exited the game and flipped through the personnel records instead. They went back years and years, and his Cheunh wasn’t very polished yet, which made navigation difficult. But he’d seen something in here last night that he couldn’t get out of his head — files he was pretty sure were marked “Springhawk.”
And the Springhawk was Thrawn’s old ship. He knew that from gossip on the bridge.
It took over an hour of searching. The Springhawk file was dense, filled with unfamiliar symbols and names. But toward the end, Eli found it. A name he recognized — a file that had been opened recently, in fact. The timestamp next to Thrawn’s name said this file had last been edited the exact same day that Eli joined Ar’alani’s crew. Had she been the one to open it? It could have been anybody, Eli supposed; they all knew who sent him here.
He opened the file with a click, and there it was: Thrawn’s photo. He wore a uniform Eli didn’t recognize — maybe the uniform of a cadet. A lot of the Chiss warriors had just their cadet photos on file; only the vain or the very high-ranking bothered to update them. So here Thrawn was, lanky and tall, his chin held high and his cheeks still round, probably no older than sixteen. Younger than Eli was in his photo with his parents the day he joined the Academy, but there wasn’t a hint of nervousness on his face: just confidence, seriousness, eagerness to prove himself and a soul-deep surety that he would do well.
Had he ever been nervous in his life? Not in battle. Not during any of his courts-martial. Not even before the Emperor, wearing rags and furs, barely conversant in Basic. Eli turned off touch-mode and ran his thumb over the screen, over Thrawn’s face, frozen in time — and he remembered the day he left for the Ascendancy, the stiff goodbye, the coolness in Thrawn’s eyes. And the way he hesitated, ducked his head, looked away as he leaned in — as he slipped the datachip that contained his journal into Eli’s breast pocket. His fingers brushed Eli’s chest as he pulled away. He couldn’t meet Eli’s eyes.
Had he ever been nervous? Maybe he had.
The Expansionary Defense Fleet had its fair share of ground missions, and the officer on duty seemed to take a particular pleasure in sending his single human warrior planet-side. Eli half-suspected the Chiss were gathering info on his biological capabilities — like they wanted to test how long a human could survive in the gassy atmosphere of Rukon or the toxic sleet of Melinar.
He didn’t mind. It was good to get away from screens and artificial lighting, to stretch his legs and fill his lungs with fresh air — even if that air was sometimes a bit odd-tasting, or felt a little too crispy and cool in his chest.
And he could take pictures planet-side.
“Get that thing out of my face,” growled his guide, a young warrior named Drask.
“Sorry,” said Eli, and he lowered his questis, but he didn’t delete the picture. They walked on through the outpost settlement toward the alien farming plots they were supposed to check. Out here, the wild grasses were a lush spray of red and purple crawling toward the horizon, creating a sort of false sunset.
Eli’s pace slowed. His thumb twitched reflexively over the casing of his questis. He and Thrawn had watched a sunset together once, he remembered now. Years ago, when Eli was still an ensign, when they were still chasing Nightswan. He remembered the spice mines, the still and quiet air, the whisper of a summer breeze through the fields as they waited for night to come. And Thrawn was at his side, his eyes heavy-lidded, his arm brushing against Eli’s so he could feel the heat of Thrawn’s skin through his uniform. Meditating. When the sun went down, warm light playing over both their faces, Eli wasn’t sure Thrawn even noticed. But when he shifted and parted his lips, ready to call Thrawn’s name — that was when he noticed the softness in Thrawn’s features, barely noticeable beneath the red-gold light, and the spark of attention in his hooded eyes. He wasn’t meditating, Eli realized; he was studying — studying the sunset the same way he studied works of art. Committing it to memory, because who knew when they would see another one?
Drask was getting ahead of him now. Eli waited until the warrior disappeared over the hill. Then, slow and careful, he raised his questis and took a picture of the fields, the grasses, the faux-sunset spread out before him.
Someday, if they ever saw each other again, he would show it to Thrawn.
It rained a lot on Naporar, where the Steadfast was in dry-dock undergoing its annual refitting. Eli had found an alien-friendly inn not far from the city, a place where he could sit on the balcony and watch the skies darken over the forests far away. The clouds were thin and gray, like gauze stretched over the sun, and a warm summer wind kicked up the dust around Eli’s balcony, grabbed dry dead plants from their beds and tossed them over the grass. It wasn’t too different from Lysatra; funny to think that so many Chiss came from a place like this.
Did Thrawn come from a place like this?
Eli frowned at the sky just as heavy rain drops started to fall. They thumped against the tin roof over the balcony, rhythmic and strong, the sort of soundtrack he could fall asleep to. Humidity seeped through his clothes and clung to his skin, making his hair curl even as he woke his questis up and loaded the file he kept coming back to.
Thrawn’s personnel file had done more for Eli’s Cheunh vocabulary than any of his formal lessons so far. Translating it was a daily ritual; he had flashcards tucked into one pocket of his fatigues right now, filled with words he plucked from Thrawn’s past. Benign words like ‘age’ and ‘years.’ Heavy-weighted words like ‘casualties’ and ‘exile’ that left a sour taste on Eli’s tongue. He scanned through the file, his dictionary pulled up in a separate window, until he found the words he was looking for.
Home planet: Rentor.
“Rentor,” Eli muttered to himself. The rain swallowed up the sound of his voice. A quick search showed him Thrawn’s home planet for the first time: as snowy and frozen as Csilla itself. Had he ever seen rain, then? Surely when he was a cadet or at some point in his military career he must have seen it, must have traveled somewhere like this and held his palm out, felt the cool kiss of water against his skin.
But not in the Empire, Eli knew that for sure. They’d never seen rain on a mission together. So maybe Thrawn had never seen it here, either. Maybe he’d never seen it at all.
With a sigh, Eli aimed his questis at the dark horizon and took a holovid. The sound of rain became a white static roar; the individual drops were hard to see, but if you looked closely they were there — and the rumble of thunder and the crack of lightning, too. A perfect summer storm.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture Thrawn at his side, his bright eyes scanning the sky the same way he’d looked at that heron all those years ago, his lips pulled up in a faint smile.
He could almost see it. It was almost real.
Every Chiss was familiar with snow — if not personally, then culturally. Even Chiss who grew up in the sunny climate of Avidich carried the memory of ice in their blood. It was baked into their traditions, their festivals, their regional religions and prayers. For Thrawn, growing up on Rentor, snow and ice would be as much a part of him as his fingerprints.
Still, when Eli’s boots touched the tundra, he wished Thrawn were here to see.
The distant hills were golden and purple in the sunlight. Up close, the ice sparkled beneath his feet, threatening to blind him. There was a deep blue tint to it, a glimpse of the ocean water that moved underneath the frozen surface.
He’d spent ten years in the Empire. Fourteen, if you counted his Academy years, and almost all of it was at Thrawn’s side. During that time, though they’d never seen rain, they’d seen plenty of snow. Looking back, Eli suspected Thrawn had engineered it that way, volunteering or volun-telling his crew into every possible ice mission he could find. They’d been to white-capped mountains where the wind was so harsh and cold it froze Eli’s nose even through his balaclava; they’d once built a shelter out of thick-packed blocks of snow, with Thrawn calmly assuring Eli that the structure would trap their body heat inside and keep them warm; they’d marched for miles over ice and snow, and once — just once, in pursuit of a very specific chemical trail left behind by a junk freighter they were chasing — he watched Thrawn remove his gloves with his teeth and hold his palm out — catching the snowflakes, studying them up close, tasting them to see if they’d been tainted. He could still see the white flecks in Thrawn’s hair and catching on his eyelashes, the way each flake melted on his wine-dark tongue.
Eli blinked the memory away. While his Chiss comrades bustled past him, he turned to face the tundra, searching for an angle that wouldn’t include his ship. Just wilderness. Just snow.
He took a picture of the sunlight playing off the ice: red on blue.
Sometimes, back when they shared a room, Eli would wake up in the middle of the night. The room was quiet; cadets never slept too soundly, and anything could wake them. Every academy came with its assortment of training ensigns, commissioned officers with no real experience who roamed the halls at night searching for cadets to harass. They could come in without warning to inspect your room or bawl you out for not having your boots lined up properly against the wall. So whenever Eli woke without warning, his eyes snapped open and he held his breath, every nerve in his body on high alert.
But at Royal Imperial, it was never a roaming ensign who woke him. It was always Thrawn.
There was no noise. Quietly, Thrawn would sit up in bed and tuck his blankets back in. If Eli held still and peeked out of the corner of his eye, he could see the way Thrawn’s shirt clung to his body, damp with sweat, and the messy tangle of his hair. Soft, no product. It was still nighttime, but Thrawn made his bed and migrated wearily to his desk.
The chair creaked beneath him. He brushed the hair back from his forehead with a sigh, his face expressionless even though the lights were out, even though he thought Eli was sleeping. He didn’t change out of his pajamas; he didn’t shower or turn the lights on. He stared at the wall, his eyes distant; when his breathing slowed and steadied, he reached for his datapad and let the light kiss his cheekbones, and for as long as Eli could stay awake, Thrawn would sit there, reading or studying or downloading artwork. Anything to avoid sleep.
What did he dream about? Exile, home? Comrades he’d lost — family he’d never see again? Eli didn’t know. He never asked.
But one night, on a ground mission on an uninhabited planet, Eli rolled over and saw an empty bedroll at his side. Whoever slept there must have taken over the night watch while Eli was sleeping. It was easy to imagine that this bedroll belonged to Thrawn, that any minute now he would be back, folding the blanket up and slipping inside. Eyes closed, hair tangled over his forehead, breathing slow.
He just had a nightmare, Eli thought, his eyes sliding closed. He’ll be back any minute.
And he knew it wasn’t true — in fact, it was borderline pathetic, the sort of thing that made his cheeks sting — but still, he turned his questis on and took a picture of the empty bedroll. Just to pretend.
In many ways, the Chiss seemed totally different from humans.
They were cold and stiff, either by nature or by culture. They didn’t care for outsiders — from true aliens like Eli to their own kind who were simply a little off-beat. They had a strong arrogant streak, at least politically and in the military sense — an idea that they were entitled to the inhabited worlds around them, that their technology and tactics were superior to any enemy they might find in the Chaos. The more time he spent around other Chiss, the more Eli found himself reevaluating his image of Thrawn. He was more like a sky-walker than an adult warrior, Eli thought; easy now, to look back on their time together and see things he’d never noticed before, reinterpret expressions he’d once thought of as unreadable and cold.
Thrawn was, compared to other Chiss, free with his affection — the journal was proof of that. He was expressive — in all his time aboard the Steadfast, Eli had only seen the sky-walkers smile, never the adults. And Thrawn had smiled plenty, even if compared to a human, his smiles were small. Thrawn was open-minded — tolerant of other cultures — less arrogant than Eli had originally believed. Unlike other Chiss, he knew he could learn from “lesser” species, welcomed questions and critique from his alien comrades, worked with them willingly and without a need for total control.
But in some ways — beyond Thrawn, beyond sky-walkers — the Chiss were surprisingly human. Eli stood in the spaceport just outside the Steadfast, at the entrance to a souvenir shop, and couldn’t help but smile. It looked exactly like the pop-up shops he’d seen in a hundred different planets in Imperial space. Stuffed animals lined the shelves, low to the ground where children could reach them. Racks of postcards and magnets spun in slow circles throughout the store. There were comfortable civilian clothes on hangers all around, and novelty holodiscs featuring all the best local sights.
But it was the postcards Eli gravitated toward. This spaceport was close to Csilla. Close to Csilla meant close to Rentor; the two planets were just a quick jump away.
And here it was. He turned the rack in a slow circle, his calloused fingers running down the plastic edge until he found it. A glossy little postcard with the word “RENTOR” written down the side in Cheunh script. Eli plucked it from the rack and held it to the light; his lips twisted in not-quite-a-smile.
The postcard showed a child on the edge of a snowy village, surprisingly rustic and backwater. The stone huts behind him wouldn’t look out of place in the primitive planets of the Outer Rim, where technology was scarce. Had Thrawn grown up in a village like this? Isolated from the modern world, planet-bound and tech-free, not so different from the life he’d led as an exile…
The boy in the postcard was wearing hand-stitched furs. He held a platter of dried fish to the camera and smiled a toothy smile, unreserved. Eli’s eyes caught on those furs, on the distinctive stitching pattern. A cultural practice, he guessed, and his mind spooled back to the day he first met Thrawn, to the clothes he’d made for himself out of native animal hides.
Did they look the same? Were they sewn the same way? Or was he editing his own memories, filling in the blanks with new information, making assumptions? Eli studied the postcard again, and in his mind, he could clearly see Thrawn’s furs, and the stitching pattern matched. And he had no idea if that was true or not, no idea if he was making it up or actually remembering it. He couldn’t even remember for sure what color the furs were back then: red or brown or grey, or a mixture of all three, or something else entirely, something unique to the exile planet — something Eli hadn’t bothered to notice, hadn’t seen.
“How much for the postcard?” he asked the clerk in perfect Cheunh.
At night, Eli lay on his bunk and listened to the roar of atmosphere against the ship’s hull. The pearl walls vibrated with a low hum; delicate white lights drifted just beneath the surface in a soothing swirl designed to optimize every warrior’s sleep. It didn’t work on Eli; maybe it didn’t work on any humans at all. Instead of sleeping, he sat with his back against the wall and his questis in his lap, scrolling through the photos he’d collected during his time in the Ascendancy.
Trying to fit Thrawn into each one.
Thrawn in an empty chair across from Eli; Thrawn in the shuttle at Eli’s side; Thrawn lacing up his boots at the edge of a dusty field or shielding his eyes from the sun. Eli glanced up and studied the pattern of white lights in the wall. They were soft, easy on the eyes. Would this type of sleep-enhancement pattern have worked on Thrawn during those nights at the Academy when he abandoned his bed and sat at his desk instead?
He’d probably never know. Eli cycled back through his photos, back to the beginning. The faux-sunset made of wild grasses. If he focused on the questis, he could ignore the rest of his room. He could mentally change it from a Chiss layout to an Imperial one: gray durasteel walls and sharp edges. He could turn it into his bunk on the Thunder Wasp, where he’d received his own room for the first time in five years of Imperial service.
There weren’t many memories of Thrawn tied to that room, but there was one.
It was late afternoon. Eli’s shift had ended two hours ago. He’d gone straight back to his quarters and stripped down to his underclothes, collapsing into his bunk for a nap.
He woke to the shift of the mattress beneath him, the feeling of warm muscle against his feet, and when he opened his eyes, Thrawn was sitting at the foot of his bed, pulling up a report on his datapad for Eli to look at.
“Sorry to wake you,” he said — brusquely, Eli thought at the time, but after meeting other Chiss, he could edit this memory, change the tone to something he hoped was more accurate. Not brusqueness but a genuine apology.
“It’s alright,” he said, his own voice scratchy. “What have you got?”
They spoke in low, husky voices by instinct, as if it were nighttime and they needed to be quiet — and their feet tangled together when Eli sat up, and he noted with surprise that Thrawn had actually taken his boots off, like he remembered Eli’s complaints from their Academy days, how he always hated the sight of Thrawn sitting with his boots on the bed. Eli’s leg bumped against Thrawn’s as he scooted closer, his head bent over the datapad, and did he imagine it, or did Thrawn go still — was Thrawn holding his breath, his features schooled? And did it have anything to do with Eli being so close, with that brush of warm, bare human skin against his own?
Eli pushed the memories away with a sigh. Thrawn wasn’t here; this wasn’t the Thunder Wasp; the photos he’d collected were a pale imitation of the friend he left behind. He could imagine that every empty landscape contained a picture of Thrawn, but it wasn’t true; and he could imagine the soft warmth of Thrawn’s skin against his own, but that wasn’t true either. He wasn’t here.
Suddenly Eli didn’t want the pictures.
He put his boots on without expression; the skin on his face was rubbery and numb. Not far from his quarters, there was a public communication pod — a locked space where warriors could record messages for their families or send out data packets for a nominal fee. Eli punched in the route by memory; he requested permission for a long-distance data transmission, high-security. He plugged his questis into the database and watched his photos zip from one server to the other, leaving his questis empty. Leaving it clean.
He sent the photos off without a word.
Halfway across the galaxy, the message board in Grand Admiral Thrawn’s aft-bridge office pinged. He noted the sender’s name with some surprise; he hadn’t heard from Eli Vanto once since he left for the Ascendancy; in fact, he wasn’t supposed to. All communication was to come through Ar’alani, who assured him Eli was doing well and had nothing to report.
With a click of a button, Thrawn opened the data package. It unfolded into his Imperial message reader with a glitter of blue holodust. Photos — artwork, he thought at first, but no. Just photos, inexpert but with a certain natural instinct for where to focus the lens. He flipped through the photos one by one. Empty landscapes, dark rooms, outposts he’d visited in his youth now turned unfamiliar by time.
It must be a coded message, Thrawn thought. Something hidden in these images. But as he leaned forward and scanned through them more carefully, he wasn’t sure. Here was a postcard from his home planet, a flier for a restaurant on Csilla. Here was an empty bedroll, a barren tundra, a video of heavy rain. Thrawn cataloged them all dutifully, memorized their contents, analyzed them each in turn — and then he sat back puzzled, a line appearing between his eyebrows. There was no message here, just a sense of emptiness, a chest-gnawing hint of longing that might have come from the photographer or it might have come from him. There were no letters hidden in the images, no ciphers to uncover.
And there were no photos of Eli.
None at all.