myownface | Nar Shaddaa, Monday Morning

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Nar Shaddaa, Monday Morning

"Shit, do you think we lost them?" Sparkle's (admittedly very stupid) question had been answered pretty immediately as the hot white glow of a blaster shot just barely missed his head. He squawked and ducked down low before turning wide eyes to Atton. "We haven't lost them."

In case Atton needed the update. Odds were pretty good that he didn't. They'd come to Nar Shaddaa because on some pollen-warped desperate level it had seemed more appealing than Baltimore, what with its distance from Fandom and tendency toward questionable morals and its Twi'leks. Possibly mostly for the Twi'leks. And this had turned out to be a very good idea for them both for a while. Right up until they found out, and not for the first time around here, that perhaps they had been getting a little too comfortable with the wrong Twi'leks.

So, now there was a Hutt mafia boss who was extremely upset (or else bored and feeling especially vindictive, which generally worked out to the same thing when it came to the Hutts in the first place), and Sparkle and Atton were sort of being chased. Ruthlessly. Not by the Hutt, obviously. But by a handful of people who worked for him, who were all, apparently, actually pretty decent at their jobs.

"Shit. Shit, fucking shitfuck fuckshit. How is it that we always end up in the wrong place at the wrong time when we come here?"

See, that was the thing. On Nar Shaddaa, it was always the wrong place, and always the wrong time.

[OOC: NFB for distance, of course, and for that guy!]

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"I'm just gonna go park us somewhere," Atton promised, "Then you can call out for a portal."

He shifted into the driver's seat with more difficulty than he'd admit to and took the controls. He let up on the speed and instead steered the speeder into a normal flight path, bringing them back to a nearby Nar Shaddaa platform.

Sparkle nodded just a little, and sat there quietly until the speeder had stopped moving. A few moments more, and he was actually remembering to gather up his blaster and put it away.

"How're you doing?"

That had been a lot of funky acrobatics, and Sparkle was pretty sure Atton hadn't been fully healed before this super smart expedition.

"I'm fine," Atton said.

Sagging in his seat, but could you blame him? "Just gotta wind down for a minute."

"Okay," Sparkle agreed, content to sit in his seat and chew the inside of his cheek for a while before digging around in his pocket for his phone. He was ignoring how his hand was shaking. Sometimes, you just had to do that, okay? "We can sit here, I think I can get Portalocity to send us a portal for... soonish."

Soonish was good.

"Works for me," Atton muttered. He shut his eyes again, calling back on that healing trance.

His mind was clear for the first time in days and it wasn't really the relief he'd been hoping for.

Sparkle took a few more minutes to kind of wind down. He wasn't completely certain that he wasn't going to puke for a minute there. But once he'd taken a few more deep breaths, he was hitting the speed dial, and the phone was ringing.

It was probably the most numb conversation he'd ever had with a possible gnome in his life. But at least there was a portal on the way.

"Twenty minutes," he reported. And then, trying lamely to lighten the mood, he added, "Maybe next time I visit Coruscant, I should take, like, driving lessons."

Atton went from healing trance to completely aware in under a second; it had the odd side-effect of his face snapping towards Sparkle suddenly and his eyes flying open. "Yeah," he said, "I'll make sure Mical hooks you up with some speeder lessons, or something."

His heart didn't really sound like it was in it.

Sparkle started, just a bit, at Atton's immediate reaction. He shook it a moment later, once Atton had spoken, and gave him a smile that was about as 'in it' as Atton's answer had been a moment before.

"Cool. Cool."

There was a long pause before he added, "You can, um, go back to what you're doing, there. I'll tell you when the portal's here."

"Nah, I'm good now," Atton said. He let out a breath. "Think I managed to knock the last of the pollen out of my system, there. Just in time to go back." He nodded at Sparkle. "How're you holding up?"

Sparkle hitched his shoulders up a little. He chewed on a half-dozen possible answers, all of them bullshit, before just settling on the truth. He didn't have it in him to manage a half-decent lie anyway, and he figured Atton would see right through it.

"The adrenaline's worn off, and I think I want to nap for a month, but I can't nap while I'm screaming forever, so I think maybe I'm going to do neither instead for a while until I make up my mind which is more important right now?"

"If it's any consolation, I don't think you killed that guy," Atton offered.

He hadn't felt anyone's light wink out. Well, anyone's that he didn't kill, anyway.

"That... is, yeah," Sparkle agreed, and so help him, he had no fucking clue how much of a relief that was going to be until Atton had out and said it. The wondering would have gnawed him apart, otherwise. "Thanks."

There was another few moments' pause before he hitched his shoulders up a little, and then shimmied down to slouch in his seat.

"So, that... pretty much all sucked."

Truth was, even if Atton had picked up anything, he would've lied about it. He'd killed people when he hadn't been ready to deal with that at all, and he wasn't going to foist that on someone who probably wasn't going to rush headfirst into war.

"It wasn't one of our better attempts at hitting up Nar Shaddaa," he said. He rubbed at his forehead. "What the hells am I even doing here?"

"I think the answer to that question was supposed to be 'Twi'leks,'" Sparkle muttered, and now that he was slumped backward, he was going to lean his head back and stare up at the sky. "Because that worked out for us super well the last time we came here to do that, too."

The sane thing would be to never come to Nar Shaddaa again.

Maybe that would even last a little while?

In an alternate universe where this place didn't draw Atton to it every damn time, maybe.

"I just wanted a distraction," he muttered.

"Well," Sparkle replied, "we got that."

It had been a kind of shitty one, but functional!

"Maybe next time we just hit up the arcade and play pool or something."

Atton snorted, letting his head thump against the dashboard of the speeder. "Yeah, that'll do it," he said. "Pool and drinks next time. Maybe karaoke."

Not that he trusted himself with karaoke right now.

"Pool and drinks and karaoke," Sparkle agreed, because if Atton committed some sort of karaoke-related-distraction faux-pas, he was not above just claiming every other song for the night and just buying the guy more drinks or something. "Or next time we can bury Skywalker's office in, like, a mountain of Furbys."

Sparkle would buy that many Furbys for the cause.

Atton shot him a bleary, confused look. "What's a Furby?"

There were many things about Earth culture he'd forced himself to absorb. 90s novelty gifts weren't one of them.

"They're like little furry mechanical pets that sort of look like gremlins with beaks," Sparkle shared. "They're made for little kids, and they sing and talk in gibberish until their parents take the damn things out to the driveway and run them over with the car a few times to try to shut them up."

A beat.

"They literally have no off button."

Because whoever invented them was a sadist.

"Sounds about right," Atton said. "Though Skywalker would probably argue his kids basically do the same thing."

He raised up his legs and dropped them on the windshield. "Sorry about dragging you along," he said, "I need to remember to have my catastrophic meltdowns all by myself."

Though, to be fair, he'd done a lot worse on the meltdown scale before. Malachor was a shining example.

Atton seemed to be in relatively one piece this time around!

"Pfft, fuck that," Sparkle replied, glancing back at Atton. "This is my fault too. I mean, you were pretty bent on hitting up the mainland at first. I jumped on the Nar Shaddaa train the second you mentioned it."

Apparently near-death experiences also brought out weird little bouts of pseudo-responsibility in Sparkle. Who knew?

And the body count was much lower than it could've been! Not that Atton was going to point that out to Sparkle; that seemed like a quick train to Sparkle slipping back into whatever freakout state he'd just been in.

"True, but I was the one who talked to the Twi'lek first," Atton said.

...okay, and then Sparkle had done the thing, but...

Sparkle totally didn't regret the thing either, dammit. The thing was something he'd take pride in for a while. How was he to know that there was a Hutt mob boss in the picture?

Don't answer that.

"Nope, you don't get to internalize this one and play the blame game on yourself," Sparkle decreed, putting his nose in the air. "We're both fuckups for this. Equals in fuckuppery. That's us."

Atton snorted. "You need about ten years to be my equal in fuckuppery anywhere, Sparks," he said.

A rare streak of self-reflection for both of them, apparently. Out loud and everything. "Space. I'm just messing around because none of it matters."

He reached into his jacket. This maudlin seemed like a job for Earth cigarettes, damn it.

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