He doesn't move. He pictures trying to go back to his family, pretending to still be on their side, and his body does not move. There is nothing to do, there is no thing-to-do, no correct next action for his body to take.

"Hey. Jawa. You coming?"

"What," he croaks. "What," he whispers. "What," he says, quietly, breathy around the enormous blockage in his throat, "would happen, if I say I want to."  He swallows.  "Defect."

Thell winds up in a private room for a little while.  He asks the protocol droid not to tell his family he's done talking to Lylat, so they think he's with her and she thinks he's with them, at least for now.  They leave him water, and snacks.  He will be glad for the water, after he's done crying.

They tell him - at the beginning, before they leave him alone to cry - that he's the second defector.  The first was fucking Lep.  This is one of the things he's crying about.  They don't know who Lep is, which doesn't help.

He doesn't ask if they're haywire, or if going haywire is real, because no matter what the answer is he doesn't think they'll react well.  He doesn't ask if the power droid he met when he was a kid is still here.  Later it occurs to him that he wouldn't know how to identify it, he never learned its number.

His number.  Or her number, or their number.  He guesses he has to be one of those people who's really precious about talking about droids like they're people, now.

The fact that he wasn't one of those people, the fact that those are the terms that he thinks of those people in, spikes another dull violet bloom of guilt in his chest.  It's the second of several times he starts crying again.

The human talked like he wanted to leave them all alive.  (He doesn't know why.  I'd probably kill me, if I enslaved me, he thinks.)  So maybe he'll be able to see some of the people he loves ever again.  Is he allowed to want that, if they're all - ?

X is talking to the Jawa named Lep.  Few other droids volunteered to talk to the one named Thell, none with any enthusiasm.  From Enseven's report Thell sounds fragile, and he's the one mind-controlled not to hurt anyone.

He knocks on Thell's door.

He's not crying anymore, and his voice is steady.  He pulls his hood down over his face and says, "come in."

He comes in.  He sits down.

"Do you speak Huttese?"

"Yes."

"All right.  My Huttese is good and my Jawaese is very poor."

"You want to defect?"

He nods, and then says "Yes" hoarsely in case it wasn't visible under his hood.

"This is difficult for you."

It's a strange kind of gentleness, in his voice.  It is not deliberately tender, there is no caress in it, but it is in a level tone that could not possibly admit of any kind of judgment, or accusation, or demand.  A simple, steadily emotionless yes-or-no.

He wipes a hand across his eyes.

He is so fucking tired of crying.

"Going haywire isn't real, is it," he says dully.

"Not to my understanding," he says, in the same tone.  "Droids can malfunction, and those malfunctions can affect their cognition and behavior, but the notion that they malfunction in a way that causes them to coordinate to attempt to escape slavery that they otherwise prefer seems to be a fiction."

He draws in, and lets out, a shaky breath.

I'm sorry would be a lie.  He does not at this time care about Thell's suffering.

"I don't want to punish you," he says instead.

"That's not - I'm not afraid."

Well.  Yes he is.  But if he stopped being afraid it wouldn't really fix anything.

"You feel guilty," he says.

"Yeah."

He knows how he'd play this if he were trying to talk a kid through becoming an unrepentant torturer and murderer.  But this isn't very much like that, and also he's not allowed to lie.

He is so hotly going to loathe what he is about to say next.  It bubbles thickly in his chest like tar.

"I do not know how to help you deal with your guilt.  I dealt with mine by embracing evil and deliberately becoming a worse person."

Well what the fuck is he to say to that.

"I am doing good now only because of this."  He presses a thumb to the glossy green shape drawn in thin lines on his forehead.  "It is mind-controlling me into being a good person.  I do not know how to achieve the change organically and would not want to if I did."

"However, knowing this about me, X - that is, the protocol droid 8X6-RA-7, who assisted me in leading the uprising - wants good things for me, and is willing to treat me decently.  This is in large part because my geas," he touches his rune-scar again, "prevents me from deliberately harming her, at any remove.  But it illustrates that it is not impossible in principle for someone like me, who has gladly done abhorrent things, to continue living and forming positive relationships with good people."

"Can I talk to" it "uh, him?  Her?"

"Her.  She's talking to Lep."

"Lep's, um.  Kind of a bully.  And a creep."