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The tavern was a pit, plain and simple. Whenever Bodhi tried to come up with something more charitable, he kept going back to a stinking hole in the ground. It smelled absolutely unholy, for one thing, a noxious cloud of stale jet juice and cigarillo smoke instantly setting into his hair and clothes such that he knew he’d have to burn his outfit later. Preferably somewhere far from his freighter, stolen though it was. Thank god he couldn’t hear the place, too. Sometimes being deaf could be more of a blessing than a curse.
He followed Jon deeper into the den, the smoky, dark interior swallowing the wan lights from outside. It was easy enough to do; Jon’s gleaming flaxen hair made him stand out even amongst the non-human aliens that dominated the place, a spot of brightness where everything else was dull and dingy. That hair had drawn his eye the first time they’d met, too, in a shit place not unlike this one. Still, Jon went too fast for him, and he had to wend and squeeze his way through the crowds, his heart hammering hard in his chest as he came close to losing Jon’s trail.
Maybe he could have, should have asked Jon to slow down, had a talk about not leaving him behind, especially in places like this, but that felt like such a stupid concern he knew he would have seemed unhinged if he’d mentioned it and he didn’t have the guts for a public fight with his boyfriend. So he settled for trying to carve himself a path through clustered together gamblers, barely avoiding a Rodian vomiting a prodigious puddle of rancid green slime onto the long suffering carpets.
He could only pray Jon’s business was easy to resolve. As usual Jon had only told him disjointed details. Selling ship parts, or trading, something. When he’d protested this detour, Jon had reminded him how much the surgery to fix his ears was, and he’d shut up. Again. Why ruin what time they did have together? The idea of squabbling just made him feel exhausted, and he lived a hardscrabble life where he needed every second of energy.
He’d just reached out to make a grab for the back of Jon’s jacket when he…heard it? No, felt it. A single note, he thought, to a song that had once been beautiful. It didn’t reach his ears; if anything it made him feel even more deaf since it made the vibrations he’d been using to navigate stop. It was as if he was standing in the space right next to where a blaster bolt had already discharged but hadn’t yet stopped sizzling. He turned in a slow circle, trying to figure out what he was experiencing, where it was coming from.
Before he knew it he’d changed his path drastically, taking a sharp left and heading past the sabbac tables. He’d all but forgotten his surroundings, the patrons, the thump of footsteps and the rattle of dice tables that shivered and jumped between his shoulder blades, the thrilling vibration that often lulled him into gambling just a little longer than he should have. He’d even forgotten Jon.
What…?
He spotted the crowd quickly enough. This particular group had clustered around something at the far back. They stood around in various states of inebriation, and Bodhi found himself taking quick stock of them as had become his habit. Never knew when a fight might break out, or when he’d have to lift someone’s credits. For the latter the drunker, the better, and these people were certainly that.
A twi’lek woman in a low cut sparkly dress, one strap fallen to her elbow, stood by with that loose posture that spoke of three drinks too many. The white fur she wore around her shoulders had slipped a bit too and was just about the only thing keeping her decent. She had another full drink in her hand, to the point where Bodhi genuinely feared for her continued ability to breathe in and out if she indulged in it. The part of him used to scraping by wanted to take whatever credits she had hidden under her get up. The rest of him felt virulent shame.
The hero of the Rebellion walks into a bar…
He didn’t bother finishing it. No end could have made it funny.
There it was again. That tremor, the note. It was a song after all, a special kind of song you didn’t need hearing to make sense of. Gods, it was the saddest thing Bodhi had ever felt in his life. It lanced up into the soles of his feet, it leapt between the vertebrae of his spine and crackled along his neurons as he bent forward, trying to see between the cluster of customers.
The sorrow addled him to the point where realization came slow, too slow. He’d forgotten all about the money now, the gambling tables, even his easy mark.
It was a cage. He was looking at a cage. Or rather, the uppermost bars of one, like a fancy gold bird cage, but a great huge one made to hold something quite a bit bigger than a pretty little finch. He elbowed his way in close, desperate, suddenly, to see what in the kriff was going on. Luckily no one seemed inclined to start a fight, but neither did they look shattered the way they should have with grief like that in the air.
They couldn’t really hear it, Bodhi decided. That must be why.
A huge bipedal lizard creature had been crammed into the confines of the prison Bodhi could now see all of, the cage bell shaped in a mockery of a decorative thing meant to keep a spoiled little pet. The lizard had a bird-like head, in fact, pointed and narrow in a way that made it —him? — look intelligent and oddly refined, for a being that could have picked him up and snapped him in half without even trying.
Its massive black eyes refocused as Bodhi came right up to the front of its prison. Those eyes reminded him of big raindrops, black fields that were arresting in its leathery green-brown face. He stared back, the sheer killing power evident in that leanly-muscled body making him dry mouthed with quiet terror. It bared its wicked teeth, but a moment later it bit back a cry of pain; only then did Bodhi see the burly handler standing nearby, holding a shock stick that he’d pushed between the bars. The lizard shied away, and Bodhi’s stomach flipped and tied itself in a knot.
It had a collar around its neck, and its wrists were clasped tightly with durasteel. It had wings, but Bodhi could see that they were atrophied, and one had horrific scarring from some kind of energy weapon. Blaster fire, maybe. He could feel that the creature was singing -was being made to sing - the notes scintillating as they wove around him. But underneath that, he felt as if he’d been weighted down and thrown into an uncaring sea.
He came close enough that he could have reached through the bars and touched the creature. The lizard looked down at him, the spines on its neck rising as if to show interest. A message appeared in his hindbrain, the smallest of whispers. No one else could have noticed, not with their oblivious reliance on their ears. The thready almost-there words made him realize that the collar was meant to control the lizard’s Force abilities, but it hadn’t completely silenced its powers.
He sensed it as they stared at each other:
You can hear me, can’t you?