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not-from-the-absence-of-violence · 3 years

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You'd break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells

“Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass.” ~Richard Siken

Moments in Leenik Geelo's life after losing his brother.

a/n: love that my first campaign star wars fic is just pure leenik geelo angst, i dedicate this one to @leenik-matagot thank u and also ur welcome <3 >:)

content warnings for: canon typical character death and violence, suicidal thoughts, refrences to self harm, ptsd, trauma and just general grief and depression.

It’s the emptiness he doesn’t expect. When they were running out of the planet the numb shock passing into the unrelenting reality of the loss he had just suffered.

There is that night where neither him or Chartreuse say anything and it felt like his chest was going to collapse into itself. It wasn’t real, not quite yet but the grief that threatens to consume him whole had already set in. it was like a gaping open wound in his chest. Like shards of glass. Like he was dying, following Tony into an early grave.

Those days blur together but he remembers eventually when the pain wouldn’t stop, he remembers cristal clear the quiet desperate prayer he sent out to the stars he and his brother had once travelled together.

Make it stop. He begged. I will do anything to stop feeling like this someone, anyone, please make it stop, make it stop, make it-

Be careful what you wish for, they say, because eventually it did, and it left the broken being that had once been Nicky Geelo.

There was nothing, he hadn’t thought it possible before to feel nothing but it was there. He was but an empty black hole. What was he now, without his grief and pain.

Nothing matters then, when the world stops being something you experience, he stared blankly at the wall. A million thoughts hung around his head.

It was your fault. It should have been you. You have always been this useless. What are you now? What have you ever been?-

They droned on, it was like listening to static, they were there, they were his thoughts and he believed them, but there was no emotion tied to it. He wants it back, the overwhelming despair, the anger burning in his veins, the quiet background sorrow that settles into your bones.

The first time Leenik Geelo gets captured on purpose he doesn’t plan on coming out of it.

He had picked up doing jobs again because he had to, life didn’t stop even if it felt like it should, the loss of Venton was nothing on the greater galaxy, even if to Leenik it felt like the stars weren’t allowed to shine without him.

It isn’t quite like he consciously plans on getting shot, it’s just that he goes in with a half-baked plan, no plan B, no weapons and not really sure when the last time he ate was.

And sure maybe when they are marching him to the brig, blasters trained on him part of him wonders why it would be bad if they just fired.

It’s not quite wanting to die, as much as it is not seeing the point in living. As much as that the moment they truly are about to shoot him his fear finally kicks in and he feels awake for the first time in months.

How he gets out of that one he doesn’t know, it's like all the luck in the galaxy follows him when he doesn’t want it.

He stands there and picks at his suction cups absentmindedly until one starts to bleed, he stares at the blood dripping from his finger like it contains the answers to everything.

He isn’t prepared for the wrath that comes next, the vast nothing in his chest comes and goes but the only other thing he is made of these days seems anger.

It is directed at everything and nothing, his brother's killer, Traxx, the ceiling fan that is too loud, himself.He who couldn't help, he had insisted to take on a job they shouldn't have, he should have been the one to fall in Ventons place.

The first time he stuns himself he can almost convince himself it's an accident. He is in fact, shooting at the fan, but who is to say whether he knew that the laser would bounce of it and hit him in the chest.

There is a flash of blinding agony and then a final blissful nothing. He wakes up very soon after, with a pounding headache, dizzy and miserable.

He knows very well he should not do that again, he stares at his blaster and feels some sickening kind of fear of himself. He tries to avoid using a blaster for a while but it doesn't last long.

It's always an accident though, and usually when it happens people laugh at the guy who just got himself stunned.

That's good he thinks making people laugh.

Leenik Geelo doesn't know the name of the first truly innocent person that he kills.

Usually there is some sort of justification for it, in his mind at least.

At some point he is at a shoot out and he very well knows he could aim away from the civilians that have nothing to do with it.

He doesn't.

There he is met with sickening guilt, and an even worse sense of perverted glee.

He sees the disappointed face of his brother every time he closes his eyes.

The moment he is alone that afternoon he breaks down crying, falling to the floor of some ship.

What have you become Nicky?

He doesn't know. He doesn't know.

It's Venton who should have lived, and so he starts dressing the part. it's easy to pass off the wig and the eye patch as simple eccentricities, people find it odd, people laugh.

Good. He thinks, it's almost better to not be taken seriously, no one seeing under the surface.

So easy some days to almost believe it's Tony who is staring back at him in the mirror. That he’s here with him at least. He doesn't know how to be himself anymore.

One day he simply forgets the eyepatch, he catches a glimpse in the mirror and panics. True awful panic, the one that causes you to stop breathing, your chest to hurt, your mind to start racing.

"I need to go get it," he chokes out.

"Jeez man, we have a job to do."

He is already running back already, his hands in fists shaking as he tries not to break into sobs in the middle of the busy street.

It is odd in many ways how much Venton had been to him. His brother, his work partner, his only connection to his home he had left behind.

Leenik isn’t good at planning, he isn’t very strong or agile or-

Together they were invincible and alone he’s just...him.

He isn’t sure whether he misses Rodea or his brother sometimes, tangled up together in a web of nostalgia.

There is so little that is left from the person he used to be now.

What exactly makes memories flood him like rivers is truly awful arbitrary, he hates it.

And like anything he hates inside himself, he fights it like a caged animal. He is holding onto the shards of himself so tightly, cutting his fingers with it, he is walking on his own broken glass.

It’s a perfectly unremarkable day on the Mynock, he struggles to open a container.

"You should work out more, Leenik."

He stares at a fixed point on the wall, he feels it, the helplessness, his brothers hand in his, he feels the way he can't pull them up because he isn't strong enough, good enough, such a failure-

"Leenik? You okay there buddy?"

Leenik snaps out of it, clearly looking at his surroundings.

"I am just self conscious about my strength alright," he says as he bats away Bacta's hand " Don't bring it up again."

Bacta looks vaguely worried but drops it, used to his odd outburst by now. Leenik goes to look outside at the stars that were supposed to be theirs.

Sleep and Leenik are at war. Every night is a battle.

The weeks, months even after he couldn't sleep. He couldn't without waking up to nightmares of every kind and every night he saw his brother die because of him in seemingly increasingly gruesome ways.

Not sleeping made being awake worse, made the colours sharper and the noise louder, made his already weak grasp on reality weaker. He heard Venton everywhere, knowing it wasn't him, his own head driving him mad.

The only sleep he knew was collapsing from exhaustion.

Eventually time passed and no matter how much Leenik picked at it the wound healed somewhat and sometimes he slept.

Nightmares were still common enough for him to be anxious every time bed time approached. So he read, indulged in the calming familiar anxiety repetitive formulaic fiction brought.

Sometimes he had good dreams about Venton, of beautiful summers in Rodea, about the best bounties they had brought in, soft quiet scenes of love they deserved to have.

He woke up feeling the emptiness worse those days, not being able to even look at himself in the mirror.

There is something so comfortable in not being him. Leenik picks up a million hobbies and drops them just as soon but dressing up he might just keep.

He’s good at it, it’s fun, most importantly for the rest of the crew, it's useful.

And if it also means that he gets to look into the mirror without having to bear his own face looking back at him, even better.

He falls into the same patterns over and over and over again. He can’t stop, like a derailed train, and it’s always him left to pick up the pieces of his mess.

Like pushing boulders uphill it soon starts to feel tedious, pointless, if you have to do it again every time.

He doesn’t know who he is without anymore, doesn’t know how to be whole, he doesn’t want to know.

It feels like he is a spectator in his own life as he sees himself grimly fall back into ruining his life in both small and big ways.

It’s too hard to mend it, he doesn’t know how to sow.

He had never thought of having children really, every day he didn't quite believe he was going to survive the week, much less enough to form a family.

The vornskr gets attached to him so quickly, it needs him, like Leenik once needed his brother.

So he names him Tony, the name feels like rubbing salt in the wound, something that is almost like comfort for him now.

I'll protect you he thinks, even if I couldn't protect him.

He stares at the place where his arm used to be.

He can see it so vividly in front of him, Tony's arm a bloody mess dangling making it unable for him to pull himself up. He sees his own hand, the one he doesn't have anymore, not strong enough to pull him up either.

He stares at his arm and sits on the floor crying. The noise of the battle fading away to the background

Maybe I deserve this one.

Leenik Geelo has a family now, crammed into a small spaceship, full of unspoken issues and painful tension.

He holds on to it lightly, or pretends to.

The only way Leenik knows how to hold on is so tight it's suffocating, so loud it hurts, so pleading it is pathetic. He overcompensates in the other direction constantly, to the point where neither he nor the people he now loves know whether he cares about them or not.

He looks onto Tamlin who lost his mother, so small, so fragile. Now his responsibility too. Maybe he doesn't know quite yet what's to come for him, all the small ways loss cracks you. He is afraid of Tamlin in the same way he is afraid of his own true reflection. And as afraid as anyone is of his own children.

"What's the name of the kid again?" he asks and he can almost convince himself he doesn't know.

So many masks to Leenik Geelo, his name has lost meaning.

Everyone has a breaking point and eventually Leenik reaches his. As he falls to the floor crying, there are people there this time. To listen, to hug him, to comfort him. To share in his pain and not flinch as they see the worst parts of him. To hold his hand and pull him up as he starts the arduous climb from rock bottom.

He isn’t alone amongst the vast expanse of space anymore.

Time passes and loss never truly gets easier, but eventually one has to heal. Eventually he grows up and knows his brother wouldn't want this for him. More importantly he doesn't want this, not anymore.

Rebuilding yourself is a never ending process that often leads to hallways you had forgotten about, it's painful and thankless and while in it it never feels worth it. But it is, oh it is, when he is able to talk about Tony again and it doesn't feel like his throat is full of glass. When people can call him Nicky and it brings only the slightest twinge of melancholy, like pressure on a sore bruise. When he can go to Rodea again, a planet he had once thought he would never be able to bear to return.

Sometimes he still gets cut on his own shards, but this time he lets someone help mend it.

He can lay amongst the trees and for the first time lay his brother to rest in his mind.

"Goodbye Tony," he says, looking onto the millions of planets and galaxies above him, in wonder of how small he is compared to it all.

"I miss you." he says because it's true, he will never stop missing who had once felt like an infinite constant in his life.

"I hope you are well amongst the stars."

#campaign star wars #campaign podcast #leenik geelo #venton geelo #my writing #fic

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kelasparmak · 7 years

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i’ve been relistening to campaign lately since i’ve been spending a lot of time on trains, and here are some dumb thoughts that i wanted to unload on y’all (spoilers for bounty above bespin - just after episode 53 in regular campaign - and probably for all of the evil campaign episodes) :

when i first listened to leenik's flashback arc i was convinced that zero would turn out to be venton. that's been looking less and less likely to me as the show's gone on, but i'm relistening to the show now and i recently got to zero's first appearance and i just. i am so worried that he really will turn out to be venton.

like:

both played by tyler davis

kat casually asking johnny 'what colour do reptomammals—what colour do you people bleed?', cause like... are the gank reptomammals? wookiepedia says that they're furry, which doesn't sound very reptilian.

the gank are also typically v short (supposedly their average height is ~5'3") and bulky. zero is 6'3" (venton was about six foot tall) and i don't think his build has been specifically described but i think marian churchland's art is at least semi-official, and in that he's pretty willowy (so, y'know, more rodian-looking).

obviously, the important one: 'he's johnny's dad, right?' 'well, he's covered head-to-toe, he could be anyone', 'yeah, but this is star wars, you don't just cut off your not-kid's hand'

on the same note, zero's a bounty hunter and an assassin and works for the empire and was tasked with eliminating the kaiburr crystals and any rebels there. so it seems weird that instead of just straight-up killing or capturing leenik he'd specifically cut off his hand on the same side as his eyepatch so that they'd match.

zero's been working with blue for 5-6 years, which would line up

i don't think the specific age difference between leenik and venton is given, but zero's five years older than leenik which seems about right

it makes a LOT of sense for venton-as-zero to want hover boots after that fall

both missing an arm and an eye – zero's are both on left; venton's severed arm was also on the left. his eyepatch was over the right eye iirc, but zero's one visible eye seems to be cybernetic, and the other is just completely covered. rodian eyes and gank eyes look very different, so if zero were venton that'd explain why he'd want to cover the biological one.

not that there needs to be more justification than canon gives for blue and zero being close, but their relationship has a very similar combination of pettiness, bickering and ride-or-die protectiveness as there was between venton and leenik (and both pairs also have private/secret conversations during group interactions) (this doesn't necessarily mean that zero sees blue as a little brother, personally i ship them, but it does fit how we see venton interact with people he cares about)

they both like giving people nicknames (nikki, char, sy)

the reason leenik handles (or, uh, tries to handle) the talking in their flashback episodes is that venton doesn't like (and seems to get kinda anxious about?) talking to people. one of zero's first lines in evil campaign is, sarcastically, 'yeah, i need to talk to more people. more distressed people. that's what i need.'

zero does not like mining planets (he does like jungle planets, though!)

0ni a) rhymes with tony and b) sounds an awful lot like 'onii' as in 'big brother'. also zero rhymes with geelo (sort of, anyway – consonance/alliteration/rhyme of l and r is perfectly acceptable in early-ish medieval irish/welsh so maybe that's biasing me re: how similar they sound)

zero is a good bounty hunter and holds a pretty powerful position in the empire (not quite ruling the stars, but hey, he's not too far off)

[wild-haired guy saying 'ALIENS'] conspiracy theorist level hints:

stazi was a kaiburr crystals fan; zero first turns up at a kaiburr crystals show, to capture/kill the kaiburr crystals and their fans

both use vibroswords (and 'the zero system' blue and zero apparently use on the regular involves zero holding his to someone's neck to keep them restrained, which venton also does with stazi)

zero's colour scheme when he was introduced gave him accents in teal, which was also venton's skintone. in evil campaign 5, he's wearing dark blue and red, which... dark blue's not as close, but venton had red hair, so it's still a similar colour scheme.

both have a tendency to repeat statements mantra-like – 'i am a good bounty hunter and i will rule the stars' / 'i love being a cyborg'

i've had almost this exact same argument with myself before, over whether a character who appears later in the show and hides their face was a character previously thought dead, and it turned out that they were the same guy despite very similar counter-arguments to the ones i'm about to raise -

on the other hand:

they’re both played by tyler davis, which is just... almost too obvious? unless it's a double bluff? but then what if it's a TRIPLE bluff? or—[aaaand fade out, fade back in on about the twentieth iteration]. also, tyler davis playing both of them could explain a lot of similarities in phrasing and behaviour.

zero's quite a bit more, idk, confident and rough around the edges and snarky than venton, which could just be development (leenik's changed a fair bit since then too) but that's not necessarily the development we'd expect

on that note, venton doesn't have any reason to cut off leenik's hand – he didn't seem to resent or blame him at all when he fell, and it seems a pretty cruel way to just incapacitate someone, especially since he used a vibrosword to do it

rendezvous is pretty friendly with zero and she's worked jobs with him in the past, and it also seems like she knew venton, at least in passing. so if they were the same guy we might expect her to make the connection, and it's unlikely that if she did she wouldn't have told leenik.

bossk and zero apparently know each other too, so he could have recognised him too (though idk if bossk would actually care enough to recognise him, or tell anyone if he did)

chartreuse presumably goes to bhikke every year, so if zero also goes regularly she might have recognised him? but also he'd probably make an effort not to be recognised and there'd presumably be no reason for her to suspect.

aava and zero get along fairly well and she's a force user, so though he probably wouldn't have told her, she probably would've noticed something was up and might've made the connection between them. on the other hand, force powers probably aren't that specific, and they didn't get to know each other properly until a week before bhikke, and honestly even if she did know i very much doubt she'd have told leenik

the fact that tobi turned out to be obito in naruto means absolutely fuck-all because naruto’s writing and plotlines are terrible and make very little sense

#campaign podcast #look i just finished a research-based master's degree #i'm gonna be finding miniscule connections and writing dissertation-length bullshit speculative essays about them for the next few years #hopefully one day i will recover from the curse of studying medieval history and literature in an area where you /have/ to be speculative #but it hasn't happened yet #queue

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