(no subject)

“I hope you rot, every one of you!” Atton leant away from the screaming old Duros as he bellowed directly into Atton’s ear. He went as far as to take two large steps away as he immediately began hacking and spluttering, showering some blend of mucus and blood onto the nearby ground. Atton grimaced, a little, as the Duros returned to yelling. “Mark me well, human. This time ... this time you’ve all gone too far. ”

“Could you hope a little more quietly?” Atton winced slightly, rubbing his ear. The Duros gave him a sour look, rubbing his hands together and coughing into a hankerchief, wiping it on his tunic and leaving a red smear. Atton mouthed a silent ‘ew’ and took another step away.

The Duros stumbled after him, wrapping one arm around Atton’s shoulders and hanging off him, looking Atton up and down and spitting. His aim was off, and even as close as he was, it just hit the nearby wall instead.

“Don’t think we don’t notice you humans, always looking down on us. You must all hate Nar Shaddaa, there are loads more of us than there are stinkin’ humans. Zabraks are just as bad.”

“Of course they are.” Atton agreed, shoving the Duros off and watching as he stumbled into the wall. “Mind telling me what you’re talking about, or should I just move on?”

“The plague, of course! Where’ve you been the past few months, eh? Eh? Or did you just not notice?” The Duros barked a laugh, spraying saliva (and thankfully, Atton noted, only saliva) in Atton’s direction. He ducked out of the way. “Don’t suppose you would. Don’t suppose it matters to you.” He produced a bottle of ale, seemingly from nowhere, taking a long drink from it. “It doesn’t target humans, you know. Or Zabraks. Even Twi’leks are safe, all of the ones that are human on the inside are safe, and they can just sit back and watch. And laugh - I, I know you’re laughing at us.” He waved the bottle severely.

“And you know what’s the great thing about it? It’s so, so easily curable. But you know what they say, there’s never enough medicine to go around, and the prices have skyrocketted. After all, people are hacking up their insides, dying. They’ll pay all their savings for the drugs to keep them alive.”

“And you know what they’re saying, don’t you? They’re saying it’s engineered. That some filthy, stinking human kriffing designed this disease. You lot are trying to wipe us all out. Just like you always do, eh? You hate everything that isn’t human, the lot of you! Kriffing speciesist-things.”

Atton listened to the rant with only a vague interest. Diseases were hardly anything uncommon on Nar Shaddaa. His interest perked, slightly, enough for him to look at the Duros, when the possibility of it being man-made was mentioned.

Any interest passed quickly: “People are always saying that. Somebody has a cold, and you’re all convinced it’s biological warfare.”

The Duros chuckled, nodding in agreement.
“So true, so true. But maybe this time, the rumours are right, you hear?”

(no subject)

Whoever he’s hunting for has left him a message.

Atton hears the screaming first, and the gibbering, loud enough to be heard even over the grinding of the machines. They’re still churning out prosthetics, he notes as he enters the factory and grinds to a very abrupt halt.

It’s with a numb, detached manner that Atton reaches down and picks up the datapad on the ground, and realises, with a slightly sickening jolt somewhere in his stomach, that it was left there deliberately for him.

And not by the factory employees. They’re strung up, or pinned against walls, or slumped against walls, each one twisted and mutilated far more than Atton knows they can possibly survive. Each one is viciously mutilated, bruised and battered, and their bodies twisted at angles that they can’t possibly go, and Atton knows they should be dead.

They’re not. They’re breathing - All hisses and wheezes, but breathing none the less, and they’re screaming. Loud enough that Atton finds it nothing short of miraculous that they haven’t lost their voices.

They’re begging for death, each and every one of them, as if they can’t think about anything else. Atton thinks, briefly, about any other possibilities and, with another lurch in his gut that makes him feel like he’s going to throw up (a tiny part of him clinically observes that he’s a cold blooded killer anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem), realises there aren’t any.

Of course there aren’t any. This is Nar Shaddaa - It doesn’t have ambulences, or many hospitals, and those it does have would experiment on them or leave them to die. Nobody’s coming to ease their pain, or treat them, or kill them quietly and painlessly.

Pain is coming off them in waves. Even as Atton slams layer after layer of walls around his mind closed, he can still feel it hammering against them, and it’s hard to concentrate. But by the time his hand is on his blaster, he realises that there are too many. They number hundreds, the energy cell on his blaster would run out before he got even two thirds of the way through.

(To which that tiny part of him pipes up again and reminds him that vibrodaggers never run out of ammo, and who cares if it means he has to look closely at them?)

Atton places one hand on his ear, to try and block out the screaming, and fails. For several minutes, he considers leaving, because he’s sure the noise, and the pain, and the fact that he can’t do anything help, and the fact that he knows this is his fault - That this was set as a message for him, is driving him crazy.

For a moment, he’s certain he hears somebody laughing. It’s soft, more like a breeze whistling through trees. But he’s inside, on a planet with neither trees nor a lot of wind. The temperature drops, ten degrees, twenty, Atton barely notices.

The people (corpses? If they weren’t twitching, wheezing and screaming, he’d be sure they were dead) are leering at him, begging, and he can see that the ones on the ground are starting to drag themselves towards him. He doesn’t even know how that’s possible, they must not have any bones intact.

As a finger brushes along his boot, Atton kicks it away, numbly looking around and eventually finding a large fuel tank. He shoves a grenade in a nook at the bottom of it, sets it on thirty seconds, and walks away.

(The tiny part of his brain notes, dryly, that unless he runs, it’ll take him at least two-hundred-and-forty seconds to get out of range.)

He waits until the factory explodes (hoping and knowing that it’ll kill off everyone inside) to run, using the Force to make his speed skyrocket and rushing out of range of the explosion.

He flicks on the datapad. An absurdly happy, maniacally grinning pink face dances across the screen, followed by jaunty red letters, declaring ‘HAPPY READING, ATTON.’

(no subject)

Atton has seven messages when he gets back to the tiny, laigrek infested motel he’s staying at. Each one just a burst of static, with the occasional flicker of the Disciple’s face. He ignores them.

Sleeping doesn’t work. Nightmares of battles from the wars rise up to the top of his mind as soon as he closes his eyes, and he can’t shake the feeling that someone’s watching him, even though he knows that if anyone was, he would’ve detected them by now.

Walking doesn’t clear his head. It helps even less when the gibbering Rodian comes over to him, thrusting the head of a protocol droid into his hands and running off. Atton doesn’t care enough to run after him.

It’s not until he reaches the motel again that he sets the head on a table, fiddling around with it’s control panel until he finds switches for three holo-recordings.

The first is just audio, just laughter. Deep, soft laughter that eventually becomes shrill and maniacal, and at some point, becomes over-the-top acting, clearly farcical, until it suddenly shuts off.

The second is just visual. A revolving, three-dimensional model of Atton, from the chest up. Atton recognises it from his wanted posters, it’s hardly difficult to find.

His left eye is blanked out. It’s just black, all over. Atton snorts, switching it off and turning to the next one.

The third one, he sees, is going to be the longest. Atton recognises the screaming as soon as it starts - The people in the factory. The image is mostly obscured by smoke, and the glare of flames, but the screaming, quickly giving way to choking, tells him enough.

The metal of the factory is scorched, disintegrated in some places, melted in others. Occasionally, he catches a glimpse of the people. They’re all unharmed. It immediately clicks as wrong in Atton’s head, even as they start to choke, and choke, and not die.

It lasts almost an hour. Almost an hour of screams, turning to chokes, to eventual silence as they finally, finally die.

Atton just pushes the droid’s head to one side, and looks for a door.