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max-hubris · 21 days ago

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@dreamsaremywords posted a dope prompt for a Clexa Mandalorian AU a while ago, and I own enough Star Wars RPG books for it to be embarrassing, so of course I had to write something. Please enjoy this meet-ugly between a moody bounty hunter and a reckless idiot. Title from a Perturbator-song that I was listening to on repeat when writing this.

She Moves Like a Knife

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Clarke thinks as she blinks furiously to clear the blood from her vision. Her helmet took the brunt of it, but there’s definitely a cut on her forehead, sending rivulets of crimson streaming down and directly into her left eye.

She hadn’t seen the shock baton coming before it literally hit her over the head, and though her armor ensured the electricity coursing through it wouldn’t send her into a spasming pile on the ground, the impact still fucking hurt.

“Fucking Cartel dicks,” Clarke mutters, readjusting the grip on her blaster. She’s a long way from Nal Hutta and Nar Shaddaa both, but the Hutt Cartel’s slimy tendrils are longer. And though she doesn’t speak much Dosh, in-between the harsh hissing syllables from the Trandoshans, she hears the name ‘Cholta’ repeated a few times.

She’s not going to let these amateurs take her anywhere, and especially not to some Hutt Cartel Lord who decided to put a bounty on her for no other reason than, in Clarke’s opinion, to be a real fucking asshole. Can’t even let her subtly loiter at a cantina in peace.

Another volley of blaster fire chips away at the makeshift cover, and she knows the durasteel crate she threw herself behind after kicking her initial assailant in the face isn’t gonna hold much longer. She chances a quick peek out of cover, managing to get eyes on all three of them. They’re all holed up behind the half-oval that makes up the cantina’s bar, a far more fortified position than what Clarke is working with. But… These older cantinas have their quirks, and her helmet’s HUD is still doing its job despite the impact, indicating the small fuel tank hooked up to the drink dispensing system. Clarke grins, happy to have her hunch confirmed.

Thankfully, everyone else had fled once the shooting started, so there’s no collateral other than structural to worry about.

Probably.

It’s gonna take a couple of shots to break through the plating, and Clarke is once again immensely grateful she managed to ditch the E-11 and its shitty accuracy as soon as she hit Elrood. As a manufacturing planet, it had a thriving black market filled with various things that went ‘missing’ from its gargantuan factories, and it hadn’t been hard to talk her way in, though she had obviously opted to forego her armor for that particular excursion. The Rodian manufactured heavy carbine she’d traded for had cost her both the E-11 and two thermal detonators, plus a couple of credits on top, but it was more than worth it for the upgraded precision, plus the extremely satisfying thump-noise it made when fired. Clarke has never been much for subtlety anyway.

To drive that point home, Clarke takes a deep breath, holds it, and pops out from behind her cover. Ignoring the shot that whizzes a little bit too close to her head, she follows the tracking on her HUD and finds the most vulnerable part of the tank easily. She exhales and pulls the trigger once, twice, keeping her wrists tense and elbows locked to manage the stronger recoil. Both shots are good, hitting in almost exactly the same place, and the three mercenaries have no time to react as the tank ignites and a fireball engulfs them.

The ensuing blast is probably the final nail in the coffin for the already beat-down cantina, and Clarke dives for a nearby window as the force of the explosion starts making the walls around her creak ominously. There’s screams from her would-be captors as they’re caught in the flames, but Clarke spares them no sympathy as she tucks and rolls, kicking up sand as she leaps to her feet and starts sprinting.

The air is scorching hot at this time of day, with Elrood’s arid climate and two suns quickly making Clarke’s armor feel like a sweltering cage, its bright white color not doing much to alleviate it. The commotion and ensuing explosion has drawn a crowd, even here in the slummier part of the planet. Clarke grits her teeth and pulls the long, raggedy cloak tighter around her, despite the heat.

It’s really no place for a lone figure clad in Stormtrooper armor to be seen.

She knows she needs to find her way off-planet soon, because even though Elrood isn’t under Imperial control, she’s seen a few of their ships coming and going from the modest spaceport lately, and though it’s unlikely that they’re here specifically for her, it’s still getting a little too concerning to ignore.

She makes it back to the little abandoned hovel she’d found on the outskirts of the slums, and as soon as she slams the door behind her, she wrenches the helmet from her head, wincing a little bit as the coagulated blood makes it stick to her skin for a moment.

“Eugh,” she grimaces as she sees the mess inside the helmet. She’s gonna need to clean that out somehow. Not to mention she has to take care of the cut on her forehead. She heaves a sigh and drags her feet through the little two-room building, throwing the helmet and her carbine onto the bed as she passes it.

Despite its state of disrepair, the house is very much livable. It stands in the middle of a little cluster of three other houses of similar shape and size, and Clarke’s assumption is that it housed factory workers, once upon a time, based on the logo still emblazoned on the doors. When she’d tried to look up the name of the company, however, she’d found nothing. Most likely, the company had been bankrupted, and its houses left behind. The other three houses were stripped bare, and it’s anyone’s guess why one of them still held its furniture, but Clarke isn’t complaining. The bed, though obviously cheap, is miles better than anything she’s ever slept on. Certainly much better than the shitty beds back at the Imperial barracks. There’s even a little table, and a chair, and a washroom with a sink, hooked up to a water tank outside. It had been dry when Clarke first got there, but figuring out how it worked hadn’t been hard, and she’d bartered two barrels of water from the nearby cantina to fill it up.

Unfortunately, that cantina is the same one she blew up today.

“Nothing good lasts forever…” Clarke mutters to herself in the cloudy mirror. She turns the sink on and leans down, cupping her hands under the faucet to gather water before splashing it against her face to get rid of the blood. She does this twice and tries to move quickly; she can’t afford to waste water now that she doesn’t know when she’ll get more, and—

Something cold presses against the back of her neck. Clarke’s hands immediately shoot out to the sides and stay there.

“Up. Slowly,” a voice says, distorted as if filtering through the voice-box on a helmet much like her own. Clarke curses inwardly, realizing this is it, they’ve found her. “Keep your arms just like that.”

As the voice commands, Clarke slowly comes back up, straightening at the waist first, then her neck. She mournfully glances down at the water that’s disappearing into the sink from the still open faucet, then looks up into the mirror.

And realizes that the person who has the muzzle of a blaster pressed against her neck isn’t who she thinks at all; because it’s not the Imperials come to haul her ass back to the nearest base to beat the shit out of her and put her right back into a squadron.

It’s worse.

“Mandalorian,” she hisses, lips pulling back into a snarl as she sees the all-too recognizable helmet shape, and the silver gleam of beskar plating.

The helmeted head tilts, and Clarke swears she can read amusement despite the lack of facial features. “Stormtrooper,” the voice retorts calmly.

“I’m not a fucking Stormtrooper,” Clarke bites out.

“That’s funny.” The hand not holding the blaster raises and a padded knuckle raps against her shoulder guard once, mockingly. “Because I think you might be.”

Clarke tips her chin up and stares down her foe, hoping her glare is hitting wherever the eyes might be. “I found this. Took it off some idiot I killed.”

“Being an idiot must be contagious, then, because only an idiot would voluntarily run around in that if they are, indeed, not a fucking Stormtrooper.”

Clarke opens her mouth, but whatever she’s about to say is drowned out by a rapid burst of blaster fire, and both of them immediately whirl away from each other, pressing flat against the wall by the door, each on either side of the opening.

“Oh come on!” Clarke shouts as she spots the very thing she was expecting when she was first accosted in her bathroom; that all to familiar white armor, as well as a gray uniform.

“Of course you have backup,” the Mandalorian grumbles, stowing the sidearm blaster and trading it for a much more formidable rifle hanging from their back, something surprisingly sleek though altogether vicious looking.

“Surround the house! We’ve found the deserter!”

Clarke can’t help but feel a surge of vindication as the Mandalorian’s helmet snaps to look at her, and she grins, despite herself. “Fucking told you.”

“Great. Just an idiot.”

Deciding that doesn’t really qualify for a response, Clarke sets her eyes on the carbine still leaning against her bed. “Cover me,” she says, and absolutely does not wait for any kind of confirmation before she dives through the doorway, towards the bed and her carbine.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no covering fire is provided, though Clarke manages to snatch the carbine from the bed and drop into a low crouch behind the bed frame in spite of the uselessness of her new not-quite companion.

Undeterred, Clarke blindly fires a few shots over her shoulder, ignoring the painful jolt of the carbine’s kickback from firing one-handed as she glares back at the faceless figure. "Some help you are! I thought Mandalorians were good at fighting!" Clarke complains, and squeezes the trigger a few more times for good measure. A yelp of pain tells her she might have gotten in a lucky hit, and there's more shouting from outside as the sound of the small unit regrouping can be heard. It buys her enough time to scramble back to her original position, next to the Mandalorian that seems perfectly content to let Clarke do all the hard work around here.

Fuck, and the fucking sink is still running.

Having grown up around faceless comrades, heads encased in white plastoid for the majority of their time spent together, Clarke is plenty used to relying on body language to discern emotion. Which is why it's so frustrating that she can't quite seem to get a read on this person, no, this woman, Clarke is pretty sure. Normally, she's not so bothered by not being able to see someone's eyes, hell, she prefers it most of the time. But now, she is irked by the fact that she has no idea where this annoyingly cocky bounty hunter is looking.

"And why would I help you, exactly?" The Mandalorian drawls. "You're clearly more trouble than you're worth."

Clarke grits her teeth at the unexpected ice-cold rush that courses through her chest and down into her stomach at the words. It's certainly not the first time she's heard almost this exact phrase, and while there's absolutely no reason it should hit her so hard, coming from a perfect stranger that had a blaster to her head a few minutes ago and knows absolutely nothing about her, it triggers painful memories, starkly reminding her of just why she's even on the run in the first place. All the things she's done that still weren't enough.

She fights down the unease and fixes the Mandalorian with an unimpressed look. "That officer out there has already reported back that a Mandalorian has been seen with me. Even if you leave me to get captured, you'll be a loose end, and the Empire does not leave loose ends. They'll start flagging ships in the spaceport looking for yours, and haul you in without a second thought. You're not getting off this planet now."

There is a subtle flex in the gloved hands where they wrap around the blaster rifle. The tiniest crack in the wall. Clarke is almost certain that they are now staring each other down, heedless of the smattering of blaster fire and shouting from outside.

"This isn't making me less tempted to shoot you," the Mandalorian says finally, and Clarke tips her chin up defiantly, feeling victory within her grasp.

"That'd make you the idiot then, because you need me. If you want to get past their sensors, you need someone who knows how to fool them. I do."

There's a beat of silence. Then two. Then, without any warning, the Mandalorian surges out of cover and has kicked open the front door and is in the middle of the fray faster than Clarke can blink. Clarke watches, jaw slack, as she moves forward, completely ignoring the hail of blaster fire that goes completely wide. With a powerful roll of one shoulder, the carbine in her hands is hefted and then three precise shots ring out, ventilating three Stormtrooper helmets in short order.

Without a second's hesitation, the Mandalorian strides towards the last man standing; the officer who is now fumbling for the small blaster sidearm he has forgone from drawing in favor of yelling orders instead. He stumbles backwards just as the Mandalorian raises her arm, and two wires shoot out from the grappling device strapped to her wrist.

With a sharp yank of her arm and a show of strength that Clarke was wholly unprepared for, the officer is pulled through the air and collides with an awaiting fist. The crack of a beskar reinforced gauntlet against his jaw echoes off the walls, and he slumps like a bag of space debris.

A high-pitched whistling noise, the wires retract back into the wrist grapple, and the helmeted head turns to look directly at Clarke as the carbine is smoothly exchanged for the sidearm again, and Clarke feels the eyes on her as two shots are fired directly into the unconscious officer's chest.

There is absolute silence for several moments as they stare at each other. Clarke has no idea what the face underneath that helmet is doing, and she honestly isn’t sure what expression her own face is wearing at the moment. There’s a non-zero chance it’s some form of wide-eyed awe.

Still. They can’t stand here staring at each other.

“Where’s your ship?” Clarke asks, with more courage than she’s feeling.

Heaving a full-body sigh, the Mandalorian steps over the dead officer. “C’mon. But if you bleed all over my seats we’re gonna have a problem.”

#clexa #clexa fanfic #thanks again for letting me yoink this prompt!#also does it count as a clexa fic if i legit never mention lexa's name even once?#it's her under the helmet i swear #they're gonna tell each other their names at some point for sure

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