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 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.

Atton let out a deep sigh, and then he rolled his eyes.

"You're not the problem, Sparks," he said. "If there's anything baggage-wise I don't mind dragging along from that island-- if I don't randomly change my mind next week and decide to stay for the next decade, which is completely possible, the way I've been lately-- it's your stupid ass. I mean, you're pretty much the only person there who didn't drop me or made me completely miserable at some point in my life."

"... Yeah?"

Fuck, now Sparkle was going to have to take another breath, because he had no goddamn clue how to deal with emotions and he was pretty sure that this round of them was a really weird, strangling sort of relief feeling and he hadn't been aware that those were something that sometimes made people want to cry, before. So he just sort of gathered it all up and sat on it and barked out something that seemed like an abrupt laugh before flicking some ash over the edge of the speeder.

"... Did you just call me 'baggage?'"

There. That was easier. It was stupid, but it was easier.

Atton threw him a look.

"Well, obviously," he said, "I mean, you have weird hair and an unhealthy obsession with glitter, and frankly you and Skywalker have more in common than either of you want to know, so you're basically this suitcase full of weird shit someone left lying around in an alley somewhere..."

"Oh, come on! What the hell do I have in common with Skywalker?"

See? Easier! Easier was... good... after whatever the hell that had been. Sparkle was clinging pretty fiercely to 'easier' right now.

"You're both kids with crappy childhoods who lost people and got stuck in the phase where you cling like mynocks," Atton offered.

Sparkle... didn't have the first clue how to counter that. Maybe he hadn't been expecting a parallel that was quite so accurate.

"Yeah, well..." He had nothing. "We probably both look better than mynocks, too."

Sparkle had never seen a mynock. Sparkle was starting to learn enough about the wildlife of Atton's galaxy that he still felt like this was a pretty safe bet.

"I dunno," Atton said. "I have this recurring nightmare where your hair and his hair have a baby and usher in the apocalypse..."

Yeah, joking about this was a whole lot easier than whatever had been going on with Sparks a few minutes ago. Especially since he could neatly sidestep reminding anyone of the part where his own coping methods with rights to losing people were... pretty much the opposite of theirs.

"Yeah, because any part of me having anything to do with any part of him probably would be a sign of the end-times," Sparkle snarked. And then, with a sigh, he stubbed out the rest of his cigarette on the side of the speeder and wrinkled his nose. "Portal's gonna be here like any minute. I wonder what other stupid shit I can get up to this week."

He was pretty sure none of it was going to top this.

Atton let out a snort.

"I shouldn't leave my apartment again this week," he said. "Can't get myself to get laid, can't get myself not to lose my head..."

"Baltimore probably would've worked out better," Sparkle noted, shrugging a little. "But you probably have enough pizza that you could manage to pull off the whole hermit thing at least until you have class to teach or something. I don't think anyone would blame you."

Hell, Sparkle had a mini-fridge in his dorm room now. He was tempted to go into full-on hermit mode, too.

"Honestly, I'm not sure if Baltimore would've been better," Atton muttered.

At his feet. Which were up on the speeder, still, so at least he wasn't staring down at anything.

Sparkle gave Atton a quick, sort of curious glance.

"... Probably there would've been less shooting." For a start, anyway. "But you're talking about baggage again, aren't you?"

The kind that wasn't obsessed with glitter, and who probably had much prettier hair before she died.

Atton sighed. This was the kind of conversation that needed a drink - or at least something that looked like a drink so he could pretend he was drunk. "Yeah," he said. "Unfortunately, I don't think that one's going to wash out with the pollen."

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