Belsavis was not a friendly place for speeders. Inside the prison compounds, the roving gangs of recently escaped prisoners tended to swarm anything valuable. Outside the compounds the jungle beasts went nuts for any sign of sentient activity. Or any activity, probably; a loud fellow animal was probably just as badly off.

So we were all walking – all of us but Tanno Vik, who had nobly offered to help Warden Graal with security back at the air-conditioned base – down an old beaten path between banks of colorful and possibly fatal plants. After my first twenty-four hours on Belsavis I really didn't trust the place.

Something loud tapped in the trees. I looked up, but didn't see anything moving, so we pressed on.

Another tap. Then a third, then a bunch at once. And then hard little particles started breaking through to the ground.

"Is that what I think it is?" said Elara.

I knelt to check the nearest fallen pebble. It was ice, rapidly melting. "Hail," I said. "This is hail."

"Hail? We're in a jungle, sir," grumbled Jorgan. "That's just not right."

"It's a jungle pocket on an ice planet," I said. The fact had been bothering me ever since we got here. "I'm not sure how many memos on how weather works really make it all the way around here."

Something clattered off Jorgan's helmet. "Not enough, obviously."

Yuun chittered, his voice and its translation sounding clear over comms. "There is a ledge off the road two hundred meters back."

I turned right around to start walking. "Let's go, then. I don't know how much worse this is going to get." As if the sky were listening, an ice-cold beaded curtain came slamming down all at once.

We reached the ledge, a very small overhang of grey rock; it only counted as shelter because of the prevailing wind. Forex folded in impressively neatly. Yuun stood at the edge of the hail fall and looked around as calmly as if the slightest change in wind wouldn't take out his exposed Gand eyes.

I took a look around, hoping for something a little less open. Nothing in immediate sight. I worked my way around a bend and found something that might suit.

"There's a crevice back here," I reported to the squad. "Don't know if it leads anywhere good, but I'll see if it gets us anything better sheltered. The rest of you, stay out here. I don't want to miss any comms from Warden Graal and I certainly don't want to be surprised if anything else comes by." It occurred to me that I didn't have much in the way of safety features here. "Dorne, you're with me. If you've got anything that warns about gas levels out of whack, now's the time to break it out."

"Yes, sir." I pulled out a flashlight and started into the passageway, and she followed.

The passage was big enough for me to get through without much trouble, which at least meant that everyone else apart from maybe Forex could make it in. It was a couple of dozen meters before it opened into a space that felt pretty wide. I waved my flashlight beam around a bit, but got only scattered glimpses of rocks.

"Dorne, you got anything better for light?" The sound of my voice confirmed that the cave was pretty big.

"I do, sir." In spite of the moments we had started stealing here and there, we did stay formal where anyone might hear. "One moment." I heard her opening her pack and fiddling with something, and then a hand lamp blew to bright white light. We both took a look around.

"Wow," I said.

The cave was uneven on all sides, including the floor. Some patches were the same grey stone was we had seen outside; the rest were…crystals. All shapes, all colors, shining like they weren't sure why nobody had put them in jewelry or some kind of art yet. A couple of them had patterns of dark symmetrical splotches on them. A few black puddles dotted what I could see of the floor.

Elara had already hurried to the nearest crystal formation, where she bent to not quite poke at the dark circles on it. She popped her helmet off and looked even closer. "I can't begin to guess what sort of lichen this is," she called. "If it even is lichen. I'll have to come back later. I want to take samples of everything!"

"You can do that right now," I said, slightly confused.

"Hm." She straightened and gave me a sly look. "There's a higher-priority task at the moment, Major."

"There is?"

"Very much so." She set the lamp on the nearest rock, then walked up and, at the last second, stepped up a little ledge so she could see me almost eye to eye. I was getting used to the immediate leadup to her bypassing my hesitations, at least, so I knew enough to pull my helmet off before she did it for me.

There was less hesitation every time and yet I was never quite ready for the moment her lips touched mine. Starting out breathless was a bit of a problem, but it was clearly something I was going to have to get used to.

So I wrapped my arms around her, and kissed her, and somewhere in that soft sweet give and take she nipped my lip again, a quick sharp shock. She smiled almost smugly when she felt my involuntary shiver. No woman that reserved and formal had any business doing that to a man in public. Or, maybe not 'public' because it was technically out of the way, but it wasn't…the point was, she had to know what she did to me and I never wanted her to stop.

Still. I pulled away and tried to steady myself despite the fact that my heart was pounding fit to knock me over. I still knew this wasn't a great idea. I didn't want to get her in trouble. I wanted her, so much I could hardly think straight, but there were about a hundred ways we could go wrong before it could even go anywhere and just declining to think about it every time we got a moment alone wasn't the way to handle it. "Elara, what are we doing?"

She regarded me solemnly from about three inches away. "Well, Vierce, at the moment we are exploring unfamiliar territory–" she looked around the cavern – "because there may be something here that would benefit both of us. In spite of–" she tilted her head toward the entrance and smiled a little bit – "a tumultuous start."

So much for any desire I might have had to argue. "You're brilliant," I told her.

"I do my best."

I kissed her again, as much as I thought we could get away with before the others came looking. I figured that as per my trusted lieutenant's recommendation we'd better thoroughly verify this territory was safe before we went back out.

Take that, sad AU! Also, happy Valentine's Day!

I entered the hangar, and it was raining.

Perhaps I should back up. The Esseles transport shuttle headed for its slip in the broad shuttle hangar. The local Coruscant traffic control dropped the bay’s magnetic field to allow the shuttle to pass without damaging its electronics. In that moment, Coruscant’s late-summer humid atmosphere clashed with the hangar’s climate-controlled interior.

Clouds formed among the high catwalks and tall loading cranes. The shuttle touched down, the magnetic seal snapped back on, the circulators went on full with a blast of frost. The clouds condensed in the sudden chill. And it began to rain.

A brief rain, to be sure. The cloud precipitated out in less than a minute. Yet I am left with a bizarre returning impression of this world.

It is a place where it can rain indoors.

Rochester buttoned his great coat, starting from the chin and finishing just past his waist. The tails of the coat covered down past his knees and the collar reached his ears. With his Navy-issued coat, he paired his Navy-issued hat and secured his gloves. On his way out of the building, he picked up an umbrella to further protect from the rain and stepped outside.

No rain pattered against the material. Cautiously, Rochester stuck his gloved hand out from under the protection. A little bit of grey light played across the black leather, but nothing more. He put his umbrella down and looked at the sky. It was, amazingly, mostly clear. Streaks of blue poked through the grey expanse of cloud. How many months had it been since he had last seen the sky like this?

He dropped the umbrella and began to close it, when a gust of wind nearly knocked him from his feet. The umbrella was ripped inside out and away from his hands, to tumble down the road.

Ah, summer on Dromund Kaas.

Day 65: Hyperspace. Next job's on Tatooine. Never thought I'd end up there.

Day 66: Tatooine. Today I learned that I hate sand. It stings. And grits, and scrapes, and generally annoys.

Day 71: Tatooine. Sand. Hate. Sand. I have goggles, a mask, gloves, everything, but it gets everywhere. I've taken to carrying spare blasters inside my jacket for when my main ones malfunction mid-fight. Corso does it, too; we cover for each other in between idiotically overblown sandstorms. Hate. Sand.

Day 75: Hyperspace. Got what I came for on Tatooine, now I'm cutting short the Republic jobs - sorry, boys, the reward:sand ratio can never be high enough.

Day 79: Alderaan. I'm officially acknowledging Tatooine as the worst planet ever. I am still shaking sand out of my clothes.

Day 81: Alderaan. Risha, if you ever suggest going back to that planet again I will choke you. With sand. Which we don't even have to go back to that planet to get because it's still infesting my ship. AND GEONOSIS IS NOT A FUNNY ALTERNATE SUGGESTION.

Kira: "I'm about to break your record boss."

Esma: "That's really unlikely, Kira, you've been sitting on the ship."

Woman With a Gun LF SANE Man

Race: Chiss

Age: old enough

Sex: female

Looking for a man who has a romantic bone in his body. One that does NOT give gifts that used to be alive. A lack of homicidal tendencies would be nice too...

***

"What are you doing?" Crae asked as he walked onto the bridge where Skari was pounding away at the keyboard with angry keystrokes.

"Finding someone NOT crazy," she snarled at him.

He raised an eyebrow and leaned over her shoulder. "A dating site?" He spun her chair around so that she faced him, except she glared at him, climbed onto her knees, and continued typing over the back of the chair.

He took a step back, crossed his arms, and frowned at his wife. "Is this about the fish?"

She glared at him again over her shoulder. "A brace of trout. Whole f**king trout."

"You like fish."

She turned around so she could glare at him better. "Chocolates, flowers, f**king pointless jewels...just once! Once, I'd like to get that crap! But noooo, I get a pile of dead fish dumped at my feet!"

"Clearly I missed the purpose of this holiday," he said with a raised eyebrow, "I thought it was to show the person you loved that you loved them."

She raised her eyebrows. "And fish say I love you?"

Crae reached out and ran a finger down her cheek. "I'll never let you go hungry."

"You're so weird," she said with a resigned sigh, shaking her head.

"I suppose chocolates would keep you fed, though," he said with a tilt to his head, a slight grin on his face.

She started laughing helplessly, not resisting when he pulled her up into his arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck. "So. Weird."

"I love you too, mama," he said with a grin, leaning down to kiss her.

Inspired by the massive number of dating profiles featuring men holding fish. Cause apparently fish are code for "I'm hot." Boys are weird.