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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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.

Well. That just called for Sparkle digging through his own pockets for his smokes, too.

He probably had time for one before the portal showed up.

"Sometimes you need to do stupid shit that doesn't matter," he noted, shrugging his shoulders as he pulled out his lighter, too. "Gets your mind off of all the serious shit that does."

Something had to matter. Sparkle wasn't going to think for even a moment that there wasn't something that did. He shrugged and offered Atton his lighter.

Atton took it, because hey, less fuss than trying to figure out if he still had his own or he'd lost it in the scuffle. He lit up his cigarette, then passed the lighter right on back.

"Sure," he said. "But that's been me since I was 21. Then life punched me in the face and said, hey, it doesn't work that long."

"S'why I said 'sometimes,'" Sparkle replied, shrugging and taking a deep drag from his cigarette. "If you do it constantly, of course it's not gonna keep working. You wear it out, it goes fucking numb on you and you're still left with the same bullshit to deal with that you didn't take care of before."

Atton let out a wry chuckle. "Very eloquent, Sparks," he said. "But going with that colorful metaphor-- I thought I set fire to my bullshit."

He took a drag of his own cigarette, shooting a deadpan look in the direction of a set of perturbed-looking Bith. The couple scattered fast.

Sparkle watched them take off for a moment, and then he shrugged a little.

"So you missed something in the ashes. Anyway, there's always going to be bullshit. Just, it changes up as you keep going."

He wasn't going to deny that Atton had a hell of a lot more of it than he did. But bullshit was still sort of a universal constant, he was finding.

"Maybe the Jedi don't have it completely wrong," Atton said quietly. "You know-- burn everything but the job. No stupid attachment to get in the way. Hells, I lived like that for years, too. Seems quiet."

"Seems lonely," Sparkle intoned, taking another drag from his cigarette to hide the way his heart was trying to creep up into his throat. Mostly to hide it from himself. "Do you think it really works?"

He didn't. Not really. He didn't really understand the Jedi beyond what he'd seen, but...

Maybe a lot of that was just the selfish worry that 'burn everything' included him, too.

Atton shrugged.

"It depends," he said. "Take Skywalker-- for him it was the worst fit in the galaxy. That master of his that's running around the island right now? I think he's comfortable that way, and no other."

He tapped some ash over the side of the speeder. "Some people are born for it, I guess," he said. "Some aren't. And some get kicked enough times, they wind up there."

"I guess getting kicked enough times will make people give up on a lot of things," Sparkle allowed.

He didn't have to live the sort of life Atton had lived to be able to understand that.

"You miss the quiet?"

"I miss knowing exactly where I shelved each and every last one of my emotions?" Atton offered, shooting him a sideways glance. They'd talked about that before, he was pretty sure, when he was doing a whole lot less good at some semblance of functional.

"I used to. Then stuff happened, I ran off to Fandom, and then I spent six years just stuffing everything behind the one door because all my shelves broke."

He took another drag from his cigarette.

"Then she walked on in and the door broke, too. Now I just don't know what I'm doing."

Sparkle nodded. He remembered that talk, yeah.

"You ever think about... I don't know... finding a way to build new shelves?"

It wouldn't be easy. Of course not. Nothing worthwhile ever was. But stuffing shit behind the goddamn door clearly hadn't worked, so.

"Instead of giving up and sitting in the hallway because everything is spilling out the door, I mean."

"I'm thinking I'd need a whole new apartment to make space for the kind of shelves I need these days," Atton said dryly. "Seems easier just to swipe most of it into the nearby trash compactor, then stop buying so much crap."

Sparkle was quiet again. His cigarette clearly required a lot of focus, here.

And then...

"Any idea how you'd do that?"

Atton shifted against the seat.

"I don't know," he said. "Move into the Temple, maybe. Do all the Jedi stuff, give up most of my possessions. Train some poor idiot to do the job, too, then send them on their way. Stop thinking so much about people who died on me, or who I screwed up on bad years ago. And just kind of drop into the flow."

"You never really struck me as a 'flow' kind of guy," Sparkle observed. Idly. Because... reasons. "That might just be me, though."

"Yeah, well, try having your brain plugged into the interconnectedness of the universe some day," Atton said. "The Force makes 'flow' a little hard to avoid, whatever I do."

Which made it a nice escape route when the rest of life wasn't quite working ofr you anymore.

"Oh." For a moment, that was it. Just 'oh.' Just Sparkle sitting quietly and coming to terms with the fact that there was literally nothing he could say about that, that he didn't have a single shred of understanding about how the Force worked and what he knew about the Jedi was laughable and he suspected that after all of that, if he tried to ask about either right now he was going to start to fucking cry or something and fuck that.

So, 'oh.' And then, after a few moments taken to just breathe, "... How much would you be leaving behind?"

God, he hated the way his voice was still trying to catch in his throat at that. Like he was some kind of stupid kid who couldn't keep his fucking emotions in check. He could do better than that.

One of the things about all that stuff Sparkle didn't understand was that Atton was suddenly getting the full load of Sparkle's whatever-it-was, here. Which was weird. Not because he could pick it up, because that wasn't new anymore.

Just... people didn't get that upset over the idea of him leaving. Ever. Now that'd been largely his fault, making sure nobody ever got attached to him because he knew he'd always bail eventually, but still. It was weird, and he didn't really know what to do about it.

"Don't figure it'd be much, if I go," he said, eyeballing the wall in front of them. "I mean, Sia's moving on, you're heading back to Toronto after graduation, so that just leaves Anakin 'Clingy' Skywalker, who can deal. You people have lives."

"Yeah," Sparkle muttered after another deep breath. "I guess we do."

Everything was still twisty, though. It ached and he hated that, that he had plans to go back home after he graduated and he couldn't wait to wash his hands of that fucking island and just get back to a normal life, and at the same time he was coming to the realization that he hadn't been prepared for that eventuality where Atton did the same. He never was, when anybody left. He always knew that they would, and then he started caring so fucking fiercely that when the time came, he couldn't let go.

"But going didn't mean I wasn't ever going to look back."

Maybe that's what it was. Maybe it wasn't just that he was afraid that Atton would leave, he was afraid that he'd be part of that mental housekeeping, too.

"What I could point out," Atton said, and he took a drag off his cigarette. "Is that as per usual, you people just don't listen to me when I tell you things about me you don't want to hear. Point one, I'm a liar. Point two, I'm a deserter. That's what I do."

So somewhere, this was Sparkle's own responsibility. You get attached to Atton, you have to deal with points one and two.

He dropped the cigarette over the side of the speeder, onto the ground. "I could," he said. And he'd be right to, in his estimation, even if it'd hurt the crap out of Sparkle. "Of course, I could also point out I already told you you're always welcome to come crash at my place if you needed to, but where's the fun in that?"

Sometimes he trolled people when he didn't know how to deal with an emotional situation. It happened.

Sparkle was... going to take another deep breath, because presumably that was good for calming down or something, and it would give him a moment to put all of that into some sort of order that made sense in his slightly-addled brain and maybe he'd kick 'emotions' in the balls a few times for good measure because he was so shitty at this.

"I listened to points one and two," he countered, eventually. "Maybe I just decided they're stupid and I'd take them under advisement while still hating them in their stupid faces."

Oh yeah, score one for team maturity!

"You know, I... if you had to, I mean... Like. I'd fucking hate it. But I'd... get it."

Maybe not right away. But eventually. He'd try. For Atton, he'd try. Not many people got that much. Most were lucky when the best they got for leaving him was a fierce resentment, because resentment was safer and involved not admitting that it hurt all the time.

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