#the sarlacc pit | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lamaenthel · 9 months ago

Text

Too Weak To Move

[read on ao3][masterlist]Febuwhump prompt: too weak to move

The Spark-Dragon's lifeform scanner made a honking error noise for the third time. "Scan's negative for anything alive, except for the sarlacc itself," Ash announced. "Again. Sorry, Ay, but—" "Run it again," Ailyn snapped at the Togruta. He rolled his eyes at her and turned back to his holoconsole. She brought up her programming screen and started modifying the inorganic search parameters to look for traces of beskar. "Qi'ra said that her sources saw him fall in. He's in full beskar. There's a good karking chance he's still alive."

Characters: Ailyn Vel, Boba Fett, Akshay 'Ash' Zaman (OMC) Wordcount: 2114 [tw for blood, gore, body horror]

Dad let out a low whistle and elbowed her in the ribs, grinning. "Look at that! That's a ST-70 class Razor Crest. That one, Al'ika. Trust me."

"It's no Firespray," Ailyn said, frowning. "And there's more rust than durasteel. The landing gear—"

"It's a junkyard, ner terakona. If you want brand new then we'll find you brand new, but you won't be able to afford it for a few more years." He gave her a look that made her feel like she was thirteen years old again, sitting outside the lair of the spark-dragon she was hunting for her verd'goten. "This is a good find. Razor Crests are decent on fuel and will work like a dog for you." He raised his hand to signal the Toydarian junk dealer. "I'll help you fix her up until she sings. You can even paint her purple if you want."

Ailyn tried not to smile too wide. "Alright. I'll take your word for it."

Dad yanked her down to his height so he could give her a kiss on the cheek. "That's my girl."

The smoky plume rising from the remains of Jabba the Hutt's pleasure barge was an ugly black scar against the Tatooinian sunset. Two moons had made it above the purple horizon, the third still playing hard to get.

It had been a long, long time since the moons had risen on Tatooine without a Hutt in power.

The Spark-Dragon's lifeform scanner made a honking error noise for the third time. "Scan's negative for anything alive, except for the sarlacc itself," Ash announced. "Again. Sorry, Ay, but—"

"Run it again," Ailyn snapped at the Togruta. He rolled his eyes at her and turned back to his holoconsole. She brought up her programming screen and started modifying the inorganic search parameters to look for traces of beskar. "Qi'ra said that her sources saw him fall in. He's in full beskar. There's a good karking chance he's still alive."

"We're not close enough to get grabbed hovering over it like this, are we?" Ash's paranoid eyes flicked up to The Spark-Dragon's viewport every few seconds.

"No." Ailyn's new program said it would take forty seconds to compile. "It's asleep anyway."

Her partner snorted. "Sarlaccs sleep?"

Ailyn shrugged. "Everything sleeps. But for the record, yes, sarlaccs are generally less active after dark. It takes too much energy to stay warm during the Tatooine night."

"If you say so." Ash leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his orange-striped head. His mutilated left lek just barely brushed his shoulder; a constant visual reminder of the Zygerrian hellhole he'd barely escaped as a teenager. "Can't lie, Ay, I'm curious."

"About what?" Ailyn fired off her scanning program and watched the screen for any sign of beskar that wasn't her own.

"You dipped on our job and dragged us halfway across the galaxy because of a missed check-in." His dark gray eyes settled on her face. "No offense, but why was the great Boba Fett checking in with you of all people in the first place?"

Ailyn smirked. "The great Boba Fett just so happens to be my biological father."

The blue drained out of Akshay's face so quick that it almost matched the white, angular markings on his cheeks. "He's your father?" he squawked.

"Yep."

Ash looked like he was about to have a heart attack. "Boba Fett. The deadliest bounty hunter to have ever lived. That motherfucker is your father."

Ailyn cackled. "Literally in this case, yeah."

"Oh my—e chu ta, Ay, you're telling me that we—that I—"

"Have been shagging the daughter of the deadliest bounty hunter to have ever lived?" Ailyn asked cheekily. "Yep."

Ash swallowed hard. "B-but you're a Kiffar! And your surname is Vel! And you've got the…" He pointed to the trigram tattooed over her eye.

"The qukuff is from my mother's side, dipshit." Ailyn shook her head. "And I'm only a quarter Kiffar. If I was full, I'd be seven feet tall." She grinned. "I'm a quarter Twi'lek too, as you well know." She flicked her brown eyes down between her legs and snickered.

Ash still looked like he was going through five stages of grief. "Did you… did you always know he was your dad?"

She frowned. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You said biological. That implies that you had another one."

"No. I had a mother who…" Ailyn bit her lip. Her father taught her not to speak poorly of the dead. "She had her own issues with my father. They split when I was just a toddler. She had a few boyfriends I bonded with, but they weren't anything I'd call a dad. Nobody stayed for very long anyway. My mom didn't let me see my actual dad very often when I was growing up, but she disappeared on a job when I was ten. After that, he took me in and raised me up like he'd wanted to the whole time. Trained me. He taught me how to shoot, slice, and repair pretty much anything." She made a wide gesture around The Spark-Dragon's cockpit. "He even helped me pick out this ship once I'd earned the creds. He taught me Mando'a, oversaw my verd'goten—it's a coming of age thing for Mandos," she added at Ash's confused look. She tapped the beskar plate on her chest. "This was my grandmother's. Kaisa Skirata."

"Never heard of her."

Ailyn scowled. "Why the fuck would you have heard of my grandmother, Ash?"

"Well, you said her name like I was supposed to know it, so—"

Ailyn's scanner lit up with a hit. "There!" she said excitedly. "Beskar! It's detecting his armor!"

"Where?" Ash stood and crossed the cockpit to look. "That's…" He glanced at her. "That's pretty far down. I don't know if I—"

"You won't." Ailyn retrieved her helmet—purple, the color he hated most, with cheeky red accents to honor him—and popped it over her short black hair. "I'm going down."

"You sure that's a good idea?"

"It's better than leaving him down there to melt," she snapped through her vocabulator. "You're on the stick. Here's hoping I can grab him and get out before it smells me. Or tastes me." Ailyn shuddered. "Dammit, this is going to be dicey."

"Yeah it is." Ash took over the pilot seat with an unhappy look. "For the record, if he kills me because I let you go down there alone, I'm haunting your ass until the heat death of the universe."

"Don't worry." Ailyn gave him a thumbs up and opened the cargo hatch. "Once he finds out I've been riding you like a rancor, he won't even remember I jumped into a sarlacc pit." She slid down the cargo ladder, cackling at the furious string of Huttese curses that followed her.

Ailyn had the durasteel cable lubed up with white grease to keep the sarlacc's acid from eating into it and trapping her inside. She had a canister full of chemically-basic firefoam to neutralize acid on both her and Dad. And she had her jetpack, which given the overwhelming methane wasn't a good thing to try and use down there, but she figured if she was going to go then she was taking the chakaar with her.

"I'm descending," Ailyn announced to Ash over comms.

"Holding steady elevation at thirty meters," Ash responded nervously. "Don't get bit. And don't melt."

"That's the plan." She smacked the windlass and stepped over the edge, sailing right down into the literal jaws of death. The beak of the creature hung open as it slept, absorbing the last bit of heat of the day as the final moon rose above Tatooine's horizon. She eyed the beak that could snap both her and the cable in half with a single chomp as she approached it.

"It's not too late to back out."

Ailyn swallowed her fear. "Keep going." She went rigid as she quietly slipped past the mouth and into the open pit of fleshy, acid-covered tentacles and stomach tissue that her computer said had a Mandalorian at the bottom of. The methane was so thick that she could see it wavering in the air like heat waves on top of a running engine. There were bodies—or the chunky, red gelatin that she assumed used to be bodies—being grotesquely absorbed by thousands of little pores in the stomach wall that opened and shut like ugly little anuses, almost obscene in their slow pace.

"Still breathing?" Ash asked.

"Barely. Keep going." Ailyn prayed that her father had fallen with a full tank of air on. It had only been three days. If he hadn't… she'd come as fast as she could, broken many laws in the process, but she'd been halfway across the galaxy.

Her commlink provided her a target like a beacon puck. She spotted a flash of silver near the bottom left, a beskar-clad figure with a tentacle wrapped around his legs. "Spotted!" she whispered excitedly.

"Good. Grab him and let's get the hell out of here."

"Oh, Daddy." As she got closer, her heart both swelled with relief to see him and clenched in horror at what had happened to him. He was knee deep in the horrific amalgamation of flesh and acid near the bottom and leaning up against the stomach wall. Ailyn searched for his vitals on her HUD. "He's alive." She almost burst into tears.

"Hurry up, Ay, this beak is starting to wiggle."

Ailyn wrapped a length of greased chain around his waist and pulled him tight against her chest. "Pull," she whispered. The chain went up, but as it pulled them the meat slid off the bones of her father's legs like a nuna drumstick. His shin bones and boots stayed trapped upright in the stomach lining, already fused with the creature.

It was a testament to how well her father had trained her to handle even the worst situations that she didn't puke in her helmet. Or maybe it was shock. "Shabla haran," she said faintly, going for the medkit on her belt. She fumbled with the latch, trying not to cry as she got the tourniquets out. The bands were wrenched tight above both of her father's knees, tight enough to stem the flow of blood from a hose to a dribble.

"Bad?"

"Start up the protocol for the carbonite chamber," Ailyn said roughly. "He's not going to make it to a doctor."

"Shit. Sorry, Ay. It's booting up now."

She waited until she had almost matched The Spark-Dragon's elevation before using her jetpack to boost them the last few meters. She undid their chains and started spraying her father down with the firefoam to neutralize the acid. His paintjob was gone, only the silver beskar remained. His kute thankfully had enough armorweave embedded in it that it had slowed down the degradation of the material and protected his skin. It was the only reason he wasn't soup. She quickly sprayed herself down and ripped her helmet off. "Daddy?" she asked softly, working his off next.

"Al…" Her father blinked a few times, completely disoriented. "Al'ika?"

" 'Lek. Su'cuy." She sobbed out a laugh. "I didn't hear from you. You know how I worry when you don't check in."

Dad smiled deliriously. "That's… that's my girl." He reached up with a weak hand to touch her face. She ripped off his glove and pressed it against her bare skin. "Proud of you, ner terakona."

"I love you." She was really crying now, damn it. She heard Ash's feet hit the ladder and quickly wiped her eyes. "It's ready?" she forced out.

"Yeah." Ash's gray eyes were the size of kriffing grenades. "Holy Ashla, that's…"

"Help me," Ailyn barked, sliding her forearms underneath her father's armpits. He was too weak to move, barely clinging to consciousness.

Ash held the frame steady and made a face like he was trying not to vomit as she hoisted her father into the carbonite chamber. "You know that he might not survive the thawing," he said hesitantly.

"He's definitely not going to survive the trip to Anchorhead." Ailyn kissed the back of her father's bare head. "Ni kartay'li gar darasuum, ner buir. Sleep well."

The frame offgassed as it froze her father solid. Ailyn circled around and leaned down to give her bronzed father a kov'nyn. "We still have one seismic charge left, right?" she asked Ash.

He grinned. "Oh yeah."

"Good." She glared at the beast in the sand below them and wondered how it was possible to hate something so much. "I think this bitch wants some dessert."

Taglist: @starwarsficnetwork, @febuwhump, @soliloquy-of-nemo Divider: @saradika-graphics

#febuwhump #febuwhumpday18 #ailyn vel #boba fett #male oc #togruta oc #my writing #star wars #sarlacc pit #body horror #gore #blood #good dad boba fett :)#boba raised ailyn au

8 notes · View notes