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There was, Neyo laments, absolutely no subtlety laced in any of their brains.
Whatever longneck had turned their tubes on had diverted the flow of subtlety from their tubes and set them all brewing between the pipes labeled ‘Curious’ and ‘Nosey’.
It was a bit like watching a shipwreck, or an explosives countdown.
One of the men tries to sneak a look at him as he makes his way to the table Gree is sitting at and fails, miserably.
It is, he notes, sort of adorable how they’re all trying so hard. He grins back, just a tad too wide, and the vod freezes, caught, and quickly turns back to his cluster.
Neyo snorts, slips into the seat across from Gree and raises an eyebrow, "You should make sure none of them ever run recon, they'd get caught immediately."
Gree hums, sets the datapad down and looks up, looks at all of his men currently in the mess hiding their glances at Neyo poorly and sighs.
"I did teach them better than this," he says, loud enough that the men all hear.
They all, to a man, suddenly have Very Important Things To Do.
Neyo gives Gree a proper judgemental look and reaches his hand across the table after only half a second of hesitation, pats Gree's bracer lightly with mocking pity on his face.
"Never let them play Sabacc,"
Gree rolls his eyes, "They have significantly better Sabacc faces than you seem to think."
Neyo huffs — he very much doubts that — and brings his hand back into his own space and leans on it, smirks wide, "Is that why your baby Jedi is taking a group of them for all they're worth in the rec room?"
Gree, predictable in all manners that include the tiny Jedi, melts. Eyes gone soft and melty and gooey at the thought of his kid fleecing the men mercilessly.
Disgusting, and all the parental emotions oozing off him is probably infectious.
Though Neyo will admit that the kid was doing pretty good, and she was, possibly, karking adorable.
She was also a fucking card shark and it was hillarious watching her smile at everyone, all innocence and naivete, as her hand somehow lost 5 cards in one round and then proceed to beat them all brutally.
“She’s doing so well,” Gree sighs, looking half out of it with joy.
Neyo tilts his head, dons the most blank look he can and shakes his head, affects mock disappointment so strong it makes the sad rations on the plate in front of them wilt in shame, “Really Gree, teaching your kid to cheat, I expected better of you. What would 6 say.”
Gree looks at him blankly, raises an eyebrow and says, deadpan, “Make sure she never gets caught fleecing them all within an inch of their life, and if she does, make sure she can snap a man’s neck.”
Neyo pauses, thinks about it, and shrugs, “Sounds right.”
Gree snorts, takes a bite of one of the sad lumps on the plate and reaches down into his pack, takes out a book and sets it near Neyo’s arm.
Neyo blinks, looks down at it and back up to Gree, raises an eyebrow.
Gree shrugs, “Was gonna give it to you anyways, before you had to get ready to leave.”
‘Before you’re behind the Blockade again.’
Neyo shrugs, casual and easy, doesn’t tell Gree that the Blockade is an inevitability.
It’s not a boogeyman, it is a fact.
Valor always returns, always goes back, always stands by Nova’s side for as long as they can.
Valor goes behind the Blockade and stays for a set amount of time, gets info and fights and has a countdown to when they will rotate out. They rotate out and pass information to the Republic and then they resupply and they do it all again.
It is where they are needed, it is what they were made for.
It is more than Nova gets.
It’s bitter on the tongue and Neyo slips a hand over the table, steals Gree’s pudding cup and revels in the sweetness.
Gree narrows his eyes, and Neyo grins, sharp-toothed and challenging.
Gree folds, rolls his eyes, “Asshole.”
Neyo shrugs, meets Gree’s eyes and eats a spoonful of pudding, gets a glare for his troubles.
He looks at the book; a real one, bound with leather and paper-paged. It’s pleasing to look at, minimalistic with a few details to make it stunning. He almost doesn’t want to hold it, doesn’t want to risk ruining it.
Gree is silent, face not showing anything other than patient amusement, maybe a little bit of annoyance.
“What’s it on?” Neyo asks, hand hovering over one of the details, a curving groove pressed into the leather that spirals and flows out into a swirl pattern.
Gree shrugs, “Stuff,” he says, like he has ever been so unspecific in his life.
Neyo is immediately suspicious.
He sets the pudding cup down, carefully out of reach of Gree’s thieving hands, and flips the book open.
The first thing he notices is that the table of contents is made up of almost entirely random subjects. Little, if anything at all, connecting them to each other.
He blinks, runs a hand down the edges of the pages, they’re neat, though rough enough that he can tell they were cut by hand rather than by machine.
It’s too genuine, makes Neyo’s chest twist itself up and he twitches, just barely keeps himself from spitting out something he would regret.
They aren’t strangers anymore, but they are still too far apart. He’s been trying, in the only ways he knows how, to reach out.
But the problem here is that Neyo knows himself, knows he is cruel and angry, he is very good at hurting people.
He swallows down instinct that tells him to give the book back, to ask what use it will be on the other side of the Blockade. The part of his brain that wants to ask what the game is here, how Neyo can take this when Neyo doesn’t know what Gree would want in return, how to win this game of gifts when he has nothing to give.
He hums instead, relaxes his shoulders, conscious of sharp eyes tracking him, “Looks a little scattered,” he says, instead of any of the other things he could say and not really mean, or worse, say and mean entirely.
Gree snorts, shrugs all casual as he eyes Neyo’s pudding with careful calculation, “Kind of,” he admits, nonchalant, “I just put whatever made me think of you that I thought you might like in it.”
Neyo swallows, and the thing in his chest is tight now, strangling him.
He doesn’t know what to do with that, with what Gree has handed him, he knows how to be a shithead, how to annoy and tease and poke and prod, how to take those licks in turn.
It’s the genuine that stops him, that makes him want to choke or to punch something, he twists the book around, and doesn't meet Gree’s eyes.
“Feeling a tad sappy?” he pokes, voice a shade too light.
Gree waves a hand with a huff, voice deadpan, “A moment of weakness I assure you, brought on by the distance between us.”
That, Neyo thinks, determined to ignore the fact that it took far longer than a moment to make this — Neyo might not know much of anything about book-binding, but he knows that this took time and effort and far more thought than Gree claims — sounds like it could be a quote from one of the trashy holo drama’s he heard from the rec rooms on his way over here.
He raises an eyebrow and smiles pleasantly, all sunshine and tiny little tooka-kittens, “So you are feeling sappy, oh little brother dearest you should’ve told me! I would’ve gotten you something!”
Gree’s eyes narrow and he huffs, “If I recall correctly, I’m actually the oldest.”
Neyo has one awful moment where he has to choose between making an old age joke or insisting that Gree is, in fact, younger.
"Nope!" he says, firm and bright, "You are, in fact the youngest. My darling, cute little baby brother who—”
Gree must sense danger because he lunges forward before Neyo can say something that will embarrass him in front of all his eavesdropping men.
Honestly, one would think they were taught to respect a cluster, obviously someone was slacking when teaching them all those things like manners. Neyo is entirely fine with ignoring the fact that he was being louder than strictly necessary on purpose.
Gree’s stare is unamused and capable of curdling bantha milk and this is much safer ground.
Neyo has a limited amount of time before he will be returning to the Blockade, before he will be standing with his Valors and trying to keep them alive and Nova alive while their Jedi sits in the core and mourns lives that have no issues killing brothers.
He has a limited amount of time here, and Gree’s book sits heavy under his palm and his chest is tight and he is both furious and grasping desperately for something else.
Gree sneaks the pudding cup back and it is like Neyo can breathe again.
He snaps a hand out and curses fiercely under his breath in about ten different languages that make Gree smirk and lets himself settle.
The Blockade looms in front of them and Neyo slips a handmade book bound together with thoughts of him woven into its edges away to leaf through later, bickers and pokes at Gree until he’s mock furious and laughing.
It feels like half a loss and half a win and he tries not to examine that too closely, he’s never liked introspection much, it shows him too many ugly things.
Gree hisses and Neyo takes another bite of his retrieved pudding.
The Blockade looms ever closer and Neyo watches Gree relax by increments.
That, at least, feels like winning.