"Watch as shadows melt,
The waves, break... The waves, break." -Robert Smith (The Cure)
She reached out and caught a small, glowing wad of Blba pollen in her hand gently enough that it didn't shatter. "Once Revan and Alek left, I knew I had to go as well." She brought the cottony pollen to her face and blew, sending a seemingly infinite amount of faintly glowing seeds into the night sky where they were indistinguishable from the stars that shone brightly and unpolluted by civilization. "I wouldn't be me if it wasn't for them and it's no easy task being the only girl invited to an all boys party, you know? And I think if that if I hadn't left, I would have always felt like people assumed I didn't just because I wasn't a man. I guess back then I felt like I had something to prove... that I could play rough with the fellas too."
"But you were a Jedi. Why would that even factor in?" Atton asked, pouring her another drink and sliding it to her across the roof of the Ebon Hawk where they both sat.
"Jedi or not, there were decisions to be made." She took a swig. "Atris was the real reason I left." She admitted. "When the two of us were young, she would always come up with some daring plan or scheme, but at the last minute would always change her tune and back out. She always wanted to do so many things, but when the moment came to actually take the risk and throw her destiny into the air, she would shrink away. Did you know that she was the one who wanted to follow Alek in the first place? She brought it up and mentioned how noble the cause was, and consequences be damned, we should do it anyway. We both met secretly with Alek and a number of other Jedi interested in joining the cause, and where I came from that meeting inspired and exhilarated, she left it with pursed lips and a worried frown. I tried to convince her to come too, that it wouldn't be so bad, and that she probably wouldn't even have to fight very much at all; Revan and Alek were going to need book-keepers and historians to keep record of the effort... someone had to. But she seemed unsure, and the morning I left, she begged me not to leave." Meetra leaned back on the palms of her hands and tilted her head up to the stars. "I wasn't angry at her. I didn't raise my voice, or tell her she was wrong, but I told her the truth. I told her that I thought her to be a coward; that she talked a big talk, but could never hope to experience any sort of transcendent enlightenment in life if she lived it in a dark room, buried up to her eyes in datapads and holocrons. I told her I'd be waiting for her, and that I'd miss her terribly and that I hoped she understood." Atton watched Meetra's eyes wandering from star to star as she spoke. "She called me a fool and went back inside the enclave. The next time I saw her was at my trial and she thought it was a fine idea that I be put to death for my crimes."
"Not that I'm someone you could class as over-critical, but I think you should have killed her when you had the chance."
Meetra laughed derisively. "Yeah? You think so? Because I think that if I had raised a blade to her on Telos, she wouldn't have stopped fighting until I was dead."
"I thought you said she was a librarian."
"A librarian that has had an incredibly long time to simmer in jealousy and spite, and who no doubt was not ignorant to the fact that had she decided to kill me in that ice hole, no one would have ever known." Meetra smiled at Atton before returning her gaze to the night sky. "She let us leave that place and part of me hopes that it's because despite her vitriol, a part of her still sort of wants to follow me, or at the very least, see what I do next. Perhaps it's just taken her this long to work up the courage to actually do something risky."
"You leave wreckage wherever you go, don't you?" Atton observed, lighting two cigarras and passing her one. She accepted it without removing her eyes from the black ceiling.
"Who doesn't in some way or another?" She asked. "Honestly, though... name one person in the entire existence of the cosmos who hasn't hurt someone else intentionally at one time or another."
"Is this some kind of Jedi riddle?" Atton scoffed, letting his eyes wander to the same pocket of stars Meetra was currently fixated on.
"I always did enjoy riddles." She mused into the darkness, happy with this flow of conversation. "What can you sustain with food, yet if you give it water, it will die?"
"I'm not doing this." Atton said. "I hate riddles."
"You just don't like thinking."
"Nope. I like drinking. I'm good at it."
"Why can't you be good at both?" Meetra said slyly. "It doesn't matter, you're stuck now. Now that I've told you the riddle, it's all you'll be able to think about until you solve it."
"I've honestly already forgotten it." He said dismissively.
"I'm sure you have." Meetra said quietly, allowing silence to fall between the two of them. She very much liked something about being in this proximity – for want of a better word – to this person. As weak as she still felt as far as the Force was concerned, there was a peculiar ebb of energy between the pair of them. There were gaudy grey boundaries, pulled taught like the webs of some sort of jungle arachnid and a very deliberate sort of distance in the currents she sensed, but those things went both ways and were curiously mingled with a nebulous and pale shade of calm blue-green waves that broke around the hull of the ship like a sea of sorts. She wished she could tell him what she saw, but at the risk of sounding stupid, she held her tongue and focused once again on the infinite night sky and the depth that the view presented her with: Many of the stars visible to her eyes from the roof of the Ebon Hawk, and this field on Dantooine, were gone. Hyperspace travel had made it possible to cross star systems and even navigate the entire galaxy in a manageable matter of time, but technological advance had not changed the laws of time and space: It had happened many times before, when an explorer bound for a new system would arrive thousands of light years away to find nothing but the remnants of a collapsed star and the broken and frigid carcasses of the planets that once orbited it when it was first spotted.
The cosmos made themselves so attainable to sentient life, yet always seemed to remain one step ahead of giving away all of their secrets.
"Anything interesting up there?" Atton finally broke the silence and her concentration, and she tore her gaze away and looked at him. His face had odd shadows cast on it by the utility lights the had set near them for some sort of illumination. In this light, he looked an awful lot like someone she used to know.
"Oddly enough, they've always made more sense to me than anything else. I always feel at home when I'm looking up. It's as if I know them or they know me or something stupid like that. Jedi Masters always talk about our infinite connection with the Force, but I always felt far more connected with the Force in relation to stars than I did in relation to moving rocks and boxes with my mind... or even people. There's more to stars than the Force and some sort of coincidence at an atomic scale, I think."
"You know, I'm not sure why, but in some way or another, I think I get what you're laying down."
"Yes, that tends to happen to people around me." She remarked placidly.
The blue-green waves squirmed away towards Atton a little at her words: Whatever she had just said had made him uncomfortable in some way.
"Does something about me make you uncomfortable?" She asked boldly. Take time to be deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.
He surprised her when he replied without missing a beat. "Nah, I mean nothing apart from the fact that you can pants me with your mind, but depending on who you ask, that could be a plus." The waves returned to the way they had been before; predictable, rhythmic and calm. She wondered more than ever what exactly it was that he was so inwardly stand-offish about. She wouldn't judge; she was a war criminal. a murderer, a fallen Jedi, by most definitions. And yet, she couldn't justify revealing the depth of her crimes to him, so why should she expect the same? No, for now, things were meant to remain on the surface, and were not meant to delve much deeper. The waves touched her, and passed her and broke on her and told her that patience would bring answers to her questions. After all, honesty was one of the best interrogation techniques around.
"You haven't been sick since we left Telos." Atton remarked, snatching her hand in the dark and placing the bottle of liquor in it. The corner of her mouth twitched when his hand left hers. "You look a bit more alert."
"I think it was just Atris being on the same planet as me." She admitted, passing the bottle to her other hand and leaning back on her right side, where she was closer to Atton. "Bad energy, I guess. Too much of... everything for my addled Jedi brain to handle at once." Her grip on the whiskey bottle slipped and it slammed sideways onto the hull of the ship with a loud clunk and a slosh of drink that showered them both. "Dammit!" She cursed, quickly righting the bottle and flicking her hand dry. "Sorry about that." She said, feeling her cheeks go red. "Here, let me..." She started yanking the bandana out of her hair when Atton cut in.
"Honestly the amount of times I've accidentally had liquor dumped on me is far outweighed by the times I actually deserved it." He said, his voice full of humour and amusement. "I was actually gonna – all night you've had soot, or something on your face." The last few words came out as a laugh of sorts.
"Oh, I cooked my lunch over a fire earlier." She said, reaching up to her face.
"Here, I've got it. You've got it all over your hands too, you'll just make a bigger mess." He reached over and rubbed the black smudge on the side of her nose away. "There, now you don't look quite so insane."
"Insane?" She repeated, catching him by the wrist when his fingers did not leave her cheek, but rather stayed where they were as he looked at her with an intensity that could not be mistaken for anything other than a wordless challenge. "That may very well be true, but I've always operated under the philosophy that it takes one to know one."
She kissed him and she liked it and it wasn't just because it had been quite a long time since she had been kissed, but rather because at the moment, he was someone that she wanted to kiss. Did it really need further justification?
And he kissed her back like he meant it. She knew fully that this could be attributed to a combination of two different things: Significant experience and proper earnestness... there was nothing more off-putting than a man who was afraid to put his tongue in your mouth or thought that a proper snog meant mimicking some sort of darty-tongued reptilian behaviour.
Gordo Wils had always kissed like that. He always turned kissing into a strange and incredibly awkward undertaking: Tedious wasn't the right word, but it was the first word that came to mind. When he kissed her, her walls flew up rather than falling down as she always imagined they would. The bond she had selfishly created between them by doing riddles, drinking wine and shamelessly flirting in general, would visibly pull away from her and towards him during moments of intimacy, often leaving her feeling unclean and bare, uncomfortable and unsatisfied like she had just done him a favour, while he would feel invigorated and smitten as a child.
Alek had kissed as well as any experimental and rebellious teenager possibly could have; with a brave confidence and shy clumsiness in regard to the subtleties of touch and sensation, but kissing Alek had always made her smile inside and out. Maybe the reason for that was because she knew that she didn't love him in any emotional measure, but honestly just really, really enjoyed his friendship, and frankly, one has to practice kissing with someone they like, don't they?
There were one or two other kisses she'd had that were worth remembering... some of them she chose to forget for the regrets that went with them.
This, however... this was the kiss of a man in his early thirties, who had been around, seen some things, done some things, and certainly held his cards close to his chest. The gentle waves that had surrounded them under the stars changed only slightly, rolling closer together than they had moments earlier, but there was no pull, no struggle like there had been with Wils, and no frenzied fluctuations as there had been when she and Alek were two teenagers experiencing the touch of another for the first time.
It seemed that with both the good and the bad, things never worked out very well for the people she kissed, so she decided right then and there to nip this in the bud because as undesirable as the decision was, it was the right thing to do.
"Stop it." She said quietly smiling, still close enough to Atton to count the flecks of gray in his eyes and smell the whiskey on his breath (and face.)
"Stop what?"
Her whole body felt hot and she knew her cheeks were the awful splotchy red they went when she was flustered.
"Stop it." She said again, because you're starting to take steps down a road that I know I will have no control over.
"I have no idea what you're talking about." He smirked.
"Just stop it." She repeated once more, desperately trying to hide her own coy smile behind the neck of the liquor bottle. I already like you well enough to not want to use your heart like a foot-sack. Trust me flyboy, it'll happen. My ability to explain myself right now is severely diminished, so just please don't ask any more questions...
"Why? You're not a virgin are you? Because I'd call you a damn liar if you said you were." He was trying to goad her into bed, and had she been just a little more drunk and just a little less mindful of her actions, she might have allowed him to. "It doesn't matter if you want it back, you've given it away."
"Stop it." Why can't I say anything else? Words fail me, and my brain has fallen out.
"Whatever you say, but you need to stop it too."
"Stop what?" She said, genuinely confused, trying to regain some semblance of control over the speech centres of her brain before she said something she really would regret: A poorly thought through and rushed explanation that would likely end it disaster was the last thing she wanted to do right now.
"Hogging all of the whiskey. Want another smoke?"
"Yes." She said. "And... stop it."
Stop giving me reasons to want you to do that again is what I'm trying to say, here.
