dsfklmvclkbmakdkjssvkrnh... aka The Morning After

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

((backdated to the day following Talk Like A Pirate Day. Closed to Fett and Sunshine, of course))

It wasn't quite dawn when Fett stirred on the floor of the Gallery. The problem was instantly registered (the way any change in his environment was bound to do) - weight and heat at his side, where nothing should be. He moved impossibly fast, reached for his rifle only to find that it wasn't there.

His eyes were open and his mind was firing, preparing him to spring to his feet so he could make tactical assessments of the area, but then it wasn't a threat or a stranger, then it -

Sunshine.

Sunshine on his makeshift bed, on the floor next to him.

Sunshine without any clothing on. At all. Not a scrap. And...

Yes. Him too.

He held his breath.

And the fuzzier part of his brain, the part he had been fighting off since semi-consciousness, came to the frontline and made itself violently known.

It... it wasn't... what in the name of the Vader's incinerated corpse had happened?

Surprisingly, Fett did what any man would do in his current situation: he sat up and attempted to extricate himself slowly, without waking the person next to him. Space was needed, space so he could think with clarity and not have that unfathomable skin on skin contact destroying what was left of his rational mind.

They had been talking like... and then cookies... he had - oh no, not going anywhere near -

He was stuck. Maybe if he moved very slowly....

Comments

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Sunshine had been drifting in between sleep and drowsy contentment that had nothing to do with all the fantastically awkward circumstances and everything to do with her body basically throwing confetti and breaking out the champagne at having gotten a little attention after all these months. Her first reaction upon feeling the warm body she was snuggled against moving away was to murmur inarticulately in protest and cling.

And then, suddenly, she remembered a little of the night before. And went very still.

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

She had moved and said... something. Which meant it was time to suck it up on the chance that she was truly awake. He froze in turn and sighed almost imperceptibly.

Fett really wished she hadn't been clinging like that. Sense memory was doing a number on him all by itself, thank you.

"Sunshine," he said quietly.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Rae seriously considered playing possum, before reluctantly concluding that she'd probably already given herself away. She was pretty sure Intergalactic Bounty Hunting School would teach you things like how to tell if someone was awake or unconscious, especially if that someone was holding their breath. Shiva wept, Sunshine. Be a grownup. She let out a sigh and opened her eyes.

"...hi?"

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

Well. That didn't give him much to work with, did it?

He started several thoughts in his head and promptly left them off before they could become spoken sentences. One word did manage to escape, and that was, "I..."

That was about as far as he could get for now. He stared, entreating her to start with coherent thought first, as he couldn't even remember how this went under relatively normal circumstances, to say nothing of this.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Food. She needed food. Alcohol, too, would have been helpful, but in its absence (and honestly, this kind of situation was much more bearable with a raging hangover, as any lingering horror could be non-insultingly attributable to a headache), sugar was acceptable. She stared back at him for another long second before hopping up and out of bed and making a beeline for the picnic basket.

Having stuffed a sugar cookie in her mouth, she felt marginally more grounded and capable of saying, "Okay. Um."

(She was still completely naked, of course. But all things considered she felt that was a minor consideration.)

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

Fett realized he was still staring about a second too late and quickly averted his eyes. The distance was good. The view was... difficult.

One thing at a time.

First thing that had taken up residence in his mind was the sugar cookie, which led to a strain of completely unhelpful thoughts; 1)it's really too early in the morning for something like that 2)He could almost be amused at the fact that it was the first item she went for if it weren't for the fact that 3)he got that all over her shirt last night -

Focus.

"I...." Next word, keep it up, "apologize." And he meant it. It even sounded like he meant it in his voice, which was quite the accomplishment. Problem was, he had no idea what came after that.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Aargh aargh aargh. Least comfortable thing to hear in such a situation ever. And why was she always hearing it? Sunshine attempted to focus on the frosting she was methodically consuming from atop a second sugar cookie, and eventually managed to say, in a slightly edgy tone, "Okay. It's...this doesn't have to be a...a problem, does it? I mean. We're both adults." (She sounded a little more uncertain on that point than she would have liked.) "We were under the influence of...whatever."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

The real problem was that Fett could not hope to convey what he needed to say in two words. But words were a problem, a consistent problem. And he could tell easily that she had taken it the wrong way, her body language was too distinct and he'd had ample time to study it.

He shook his head sharply at her question, almost insulted. What kind of problem did she anticipate having? He collected his thoughts carefully, arranged them as simply as he could. He started to speak. Stopped. Tried again. Not quite.

Third time was not a charm, but it did produce sound. "I was apologizing for my lack of control, which was unforgivable under the circumstances. Regardless of the influence. I tried to... I've never been..." incapable of controlling my own actions and you probably have no idea what it means to my mind.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

No, she really didn't understand what that meant to him. She was still a little too caught up in her own freakout, and though she wasn't unsympathetic she also didn't really have the background necessary to understand fully the idea of loss of control.

"I just. I...we're friends. Right?" Pathetic. But she couldn't help remembering that idea of not intensifying a bond they already didn't know what to do with.

"I wasn't particularly...controlled, either. So."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

If there ever was a difficult question. Of course, for someone else it wouldn't be. Or maybe it would, he had no idea. But that word, friend, he had very specific problems with that word. "Friends are a liability in my trade," that was what he had told the Assembler.

"You are one of half a dozen living people to have ever seen my face," he said by way of an answer, making sure to meet her eyes on that. He wasn't certain if the meaning would come across, but it was there. Removing the armor was nearly as intimate as anything else that had happened last night. He should have felt worse about it than he did, but he didn't, not enough despite feeling so overexposed. And that meant something about her.

No, she hadn't been particularly controlled, and did that bring up a slew of mental images he could do without right then. He felt his gaze grow oddly heated under those thoughts and made sure to bow his head away.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Well gosh, as an answer that wasn't unnerving at all. Especially considering the adjective "living."

And yet she still shivered a little with the heat of his gaze. His face was mostly expressionless, but it was still somewhat comprehensible compared to a vampire's, and she was abruptly looking in another direction as well.

On her third cookie now, she finally took adequate notice of her nakedness, and began searching around for her clothes.

"Do you want...would you like some water? This doesn't have to be a thing," she insisted, as though it were somehow all the same question.

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

That was about as incomprehensible to him as his last comment had been unnerving to her. He looked back up. "Thing?"

Then there was the earlier part of that, which still demanded an answer. "Yes, if you're getting some already," he said. There were bottles of water stacked in various corners, but she was looking for garments and it occurred to him that he should do the same. It was strange enough attempting an entire conversation while neither of them were clothed; he had merely stalled for her sake. He reached across the floor a ways and pulled his jumpsuit to him, rearranging the blaster-resistant fabric so it was no longer half inside out.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

And she really didn't know how to put it anymore clearly without wanting to sink into the ground. "I mean. Things happen. Especially around here," she added, not without a certain wrath.

Right. Water. She grabbed the nearest bottle of water and brought it over to him. Which was sort of a drawback, in a way, having to venture near to him again, and what was he doing with that leotard thing? She'd help him sort out it out...she'd do no such thing, she'd bite her own hand off at the wrist before she reached out to him again.

(What had given him all those scars?)

Underwear, underwear, underwear...how the hell had it gotten there...?

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

Still no idea exactly what she was getting at. He was a bit too straightforward in his own practices to handle vagueness in any capacity. It was probably just as well.

There was the problem of her coming closer again, which he hadn't thought of beforehand and now regretted. He took the bottle of water, avoiding that clichéd brush of fingertips, and drank for a few moments. Then he cleared his throat loudly; his voice was hoarse, no wonder considering...

He knew exactly how her underwear had gotten over there, but it was not something he was going to think about at the moment. A good mental block was worth a thousand credits.

(He caught that glance.)

It had only been a matter of time anyway. "If we are in fact... friends... you should be able to ask a question."

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Sunshine considered this for a moment, avoiding eye contact through the cunning means of picking up and examining her frosting-smeared t-shirt. Oh well. She pulled it back over her head, and, flipping her hair out from under her collar, said:

"I...have this bad habit of not asking questions. I don't know. Maybe it's because I don't usually enjoy questions, trying to figure out what to say. Maybe I'm afraid of answers. I usually assume if people...friends, need me to know something, they'll tell me. Which is kind of stupid, because it doesn't work that way, not even slightly. Gets me into trouble. But it's hard to know what to ask."

"So. Um. Looks like you had a not-so-fun day, once upon a time."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

No, it never did work that way. Certainly not with him, the one who declared two words superior to ten under every circumstance.

Not-so-fun day. Actually, he was fairly sure it had been more than a day, but it wasn't something he had ever really checked into. It was best left lost.

This wasn't exactly something he could explain while attempting to reassemble his clothes, so he pulled the jumpsuit across his lap for decency sake and looked up at her. "I was...." No, no comfortable or easy way to say it. Just go. "Swallowed. By a sarlaac. And nearly digested."

He predicted that she might want some clarification on that account before he said anything else, so he paused and waited.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Whereas she was inclined to babble, as soon as she started talking. Which was a big part of why she didn't think of herself as a talker, in general: she always ended up saying more than she wanted to, more than was entirely safe. Maybe if she'd been brought up by the Blaises and had a whole family to share secrets with she might have learned how to not to share, how keep her conversations noncommittal, casual. But her mother had taken her away, had refused to discuss or acknowledge anything that didn't fit a narrow definition of normal, and Rae had found it easier to focus on the unambivalencies of flour and water and salt turning into dough, dough becoming bread, and let other people do the talking.

What did it mean, though, that she kept being...forming attachments to laconic types? With complicated problems that she could barely decode even when they were trying to communicate? "Digested? What's a sarlaac?"

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

"A carnivorous creature that buries itself into a landscape and stays there its entire life, awaiting prey. In this case it was a desert planet called Tatooine, and I was knocked in." On accident, Fett still couldn't believe. Solo had gotten lucky and he had paid for it in enough agony to last the rest of his life.

He hadn't given a very clear mental picture, he realized. "It looks like a large pit with a snapping jaw, teeth and tentacles. It can keep its food alive for hundreds of years while it digests, if it choses." To amuse the first victim, the one with the empathetic bond to it, the one who needs company....

"Oh, but you are not going to get out again, Boba Fett. No one ever has, and you won't be the first." Those were the words.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

"That's...skegging hell. I'm sorry." Well, really, what did you say to that? Some semi-hysterical part of her wanted to ask how on earth (or wherever) they knew how long victims could be kept alive and for that matter how it chose, but her brain's sense of self-preservation informed her that that was one of those things she really most likely didn't want to know.

Trying to come up with an acceptable response through the sheer boggle she was doing, she came up with, "How did you get out?"

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

The shrug was small. "It's in the past," he said simply, and it was convincing, maybe. Even if he knew it wasn't true.

He could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears and he said, "I'm going to kill you very slowly," and he had never meant anything more in his life.

"I... made it angry." That was the easiest way to explain it. No, not entirely. He had never needed to make anyone understand it before. "Well, not the sarlaac precisely. It formed an empathic bond with the first person it swallowed, many years before. Kept him alive so it could have a connection to whatever it took in next. His name was Susejo. And he was-" evil, a terror, a sociopathic, philosophical raving lunatic, "-just a child."*

Without noticing, Fett's hand had fisted in the fabric of the jumpsuit. He stared at the corner of the wall intently. "My armor protected me for a time, but the sarlaac would have gotten through it eventually. So I made the boy angry. Made the sarlaac angry so it lost its grip, and managed to fire the jetpack." In an enclosed space, which was bad news. It had been the only option. "It took some time, but I eventually found my way out. The sarlaac died in the process." It had been a little more complicated than that, but he didn't think every detail was necessary. She didn't need to know about acid-burned skin catching fire, how he'd gone unconscious, how many people had finally died down there.

"Another bounty hunter found me at the edge of the wreckage and nursed me back to health."

*Yeah, I think tomorrow I'll put up some excerpts from this story on his journal. It's made of crazy.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

She'd had a little experience with things being in the past. Which wasn't to say that they were exactly the same kind of things, obviously most of what he was talking about was far outside of anything she'd ever known - or ever wanted to know, anyway -

- well, anyway, this wasn't about her. She sat down on the floor a few feet from him, in an unconscious imitation of his own awkward offer of comfort, months ago, and watched his hand grip the jumpsuit.

"That was very resourceful," she said quietly after a moment. Which was an understatement, obviously. Not that she didn't figure he would've preferred another way to demonstrate his resourcefulness to the universe.

She reached out to touch one of the scars on his wrist.

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

"It was a gamble," he insisted. Not even a sound one. But it had been the only bet to make. The only time when he hadn't been sure of the outcome he would produce, no frame of reference, no way to predict, nothing.

He hadn't felt fear down there, but he had known horror.

Sunshine's fingers were at his wrist. It was different from before, maybe from the confession or what had happened a several hours ago. He didn't breathe sharply, though his blood sped up in his veins. He couldn't even tell why anymore. He turned his hand over, exposing the other side of his wrist almost gingerly. It was strange to look at, even after having the scars for so many years. Like the story belonged to someone else, hazy and trying for distance.

"It will heal eventually. Until then, the reminder remains, for all the good it may do."

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Her fingers stayed softly on his wrist as he turned it, tracing scarred and undamaged skin both.

"Well, yeah. But to make a gamble you have to be able to see that it's there to be made."

(My capacity for invention is flash hot stark she'd thought once, rather bitterly. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention the recipes. Pity about the rest of me.)

"You also have to go ahead and do it. Without going gibbering and helpless with fear or pain, like..." She rubbed the base of his thumb, her head bowed a little. "Not that that's much of a comfort afterwards. But at least you get to have an afterwards in which to try not to think about it."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

The criticism of herself would have been hard to miss. "You're still here," he told her. And though it may not have been the most reassuring thing to say, the point still stood.

He watched her hand as she touched him. He thought it shouldn't have been so jarring now, not after.... If he allowed himself to have an opinion on it one way or the other (though his body seemed to have an independent opinion on it, moving into it almost imperceptibly), to really think it through, he was sure it would be devastating to him. This was alien, comfort in touch was not something he had been given since -

But that was locked up tight. If there was one place his memory wouldn't go, amidst years of war, brutality and change, it was there.

"I was trained into it from a young age." She should know that. No reason to feel useless with herself, it wasn't something he had been born into either. Unless the bloodline pull really was that strong. But then... that wasn't real either.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Sunshine smiled, faintly grim, head still down and her (always willful, but now spectacularly mussed) hair falling in her eyes. "Oh, I have my moments. It's just. All the other moments surrounding the moments of fantastically stupid heroism with butterknives. It'd be easier if I were just...one thing or another." She paused and thought a moment. "Or maybe it wouldn't. I don't know."

She could feel him relaxing ever so slightly, and kept rubbing circles against his palm. "What kind of training?" she asked, genuinely interested.

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

It was interesting when you could raise an eyebrow and it would actually carry its meaning across. Sometimes he forgot that he was capable of such simple motions, only to have them catch up to him at the most random moments. "Butterknives?"

What kind of training.... He should have known she'd ask, and this wasn't exactly one of the easy parts to explain. Which was saying something, clearly, if it was more complicated than being eaten alive by a giant monster. "Bounty hunting training from my father, for one. And then basic schooling, combat training, battle conditioning, strategy and tactics, mechanics and engineering, flight school. I was raised the first ten years of my life at... a military facility." But it still took that last half to make it honest, and the circles against this palm were demanding whole truths, so he pressed out, "A facility that trained a clone army."

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

"Well. Butterknife. Completely the stupidest thing I've ever done," she said, almost amused at the idea now, over a year later, and she had always anyway had that desperate, hysterical tinge of darkness to her sense of humor. "Much stupider than going out to the cabin should've been. I honestly think it only worked at all because the sucker was so surprised anyone would even try something so impossible."

Sunshine listened to his little discussion of curriculum. The described courses were comprehensible, or would be if they'd applied to adults instead of children - really, how could you teach a child younger than ten anything like that? But a clone army?

It really was like the science fiction stories she'd read when she was younger, Sunshine thought. She'd had two little brothers always demanding stories from her; she loved fairy tales best, but there was something approachable in the yellowing paperbacks with their covers of rockets and robots and improbably attired blondes on distant moons; they were both closer and farther away from being real than Beauty and the Beast. Even if she had often had to change the stories in her own versions so the heroines weren't quite so hopeless.

Was that really what his life had been like? Her world had nothing like the technology to make clones, it was all a thousand times more of a fantasy than the silly pre-War gothic novels she'd moved on to as she got older. She knew what a clone was, but it would have been easier to understand if he'd said he'd been raised by demons. She could have asked what kind.

"How was that? I mean," hearing the stupidity of that question, "was it lonely? or hard? or good to know what you were supposed to be doing with yourself? Obviously it's been useful."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

If he had understood that correctly... "You tried to kill someone with a butterknife?" Suddenly, the small knife she'd had on hand at their surprise first meeting made more sense.

He wouldn't blame her if most of this was going straight past her. She came from a world with magic (and it was still hard for him to think of the word seriously, near impossible for him to comprehend it in the way she meant it). Without space and the high sciences he took for granted. Perhaps the oddest thing about it was that they could communicate at all.

At the question of loneliness, the answer came up fast enough to be somewhat telling: "I had my father." As though that explained everything. And it did, essentially. "The rest on Kamino were created to be soldiers, and were brought up and taught only for that purpose. My father raised me with his own knowledge and experience in addition, so...." There was never any doubt. Never a thought that I might want to be something else. I wanted what he wanted. I still do.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

"Well," she said, "That depends on how 'someone' you think a vampire is." An incredibly awkward question for her; the answer for almost any other human from her world would have been that vampires were the opposite of people: inimical to life and everything good. Sunshine had actually always been a bit of a liberal in respect to the rights of the Others: thought the treatment of weres and peris and humans with demon blood in her society was unjust. But even partbloods abhorred vampires, more so even than many humans, because their persecution was directly linked to their being associated with those Darkest Others, who held so much power even now after the Wars, and saw all the other species only as prey.

How, exactly, did you square that with having a vampire friend? There wasn't even a word in human language for someone so sick as to let a vampire escape and go on to kill - because all vampires killed, that was what they were...

None of which she really felt like explaining. Instead, she picked the easier story to tell, which wouldn't have been easier compared to, well, anything else.

"It was about a month after I was taken, and escaped," she said, and was almost surprised to find her voice mostly steady. "I was in the kitchen, doing the last of the dessert orders, and I heard this...laugh, this goblin giggle, outside." She shouldn't have been able to hear it from that distance down the street, of course, but that was just the tip of the iceberg for things she shouldn't have been able to do.

"The suckers who'd grabbed me, one of them had had a...sense of humor. And I recognized that damn giggle. So I went just..." and this was the funny part, really, she had to shake her head at herself, "just charging out through the coffeehouse, grabbed something off one of the tables as I went. A stainless steel butterknife."

Realizing the absurdity of this might be partly lost on Fett, she clarified, "You can't use unenchanted metal on vampires, they've got this sort of field around their skin. Blades and bullets just skitter right off it. If it's consecrated silver, maybe, but for the most part it takes a wooden stake through the heart. So obviously stainless steel is a no-hoper."

"Anyway. I ran out there and...that's another thing, there's no way a human should be able to take a vampire by surprise, they're so much quicker. But. He had his back to me and he had hold of a girl and he was...he was putting her under. So I guess that's what he was concentrating on, and I came charging up probably sounding like an arthritic rhino to him. He probably didn't bother to move because, duh, what did I even think I was doing. And I...used the knife."

"And then," she felt she had to add, "I threw up. Repeatedly. Which was worse even it would have been anyway because I was all covered...the whole alley was covered in...rotten blood and horrible stuff...vampires, um. Explode. When you stake them."

...why had any of this seemed like something for comforting friendly story-sharing time?

"I was out of my head for a few minutes there. I guess...I guess the way to look at it is that I saved a girl's life," (said almost as if this aspect hadn't occurred to her in the wake of realizing how phenomenally impossible what she'd just done was, and how much attention she'd just drawn to herself from all the wrong places). "Pat said she was okay, afterwards. Mostly, when people are more than half under the dark, their minds sort of...well, they're not okay. So."

...she should really stop talking about all of this. Right about now. Sunshine looked over at the window at the front of the Gallery, growing pale with dawn, and said, apparently inconsequentially, "I miss real sunrises. Birds singing."

At some point, she found, she'd drawn her knees up to her chest, though her hand was still touching Fett's. She wondered if he was just too polite to pull away, after a story like that. "I'm. Glad you had someone. That's important for kids."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

((rethreaded! (http://community.livejournal.com/dizzy_land/176460.html?thread=10187596#t10187596)))

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

Pulling away would have been the height of hypocrisy for anyone who had done the things he had done in the course of his life. Whether or not morality ever came into play on an individual basis, nobility was not something a bounty hunter could pretend toward. If anything, her story was probably one of the easiest things for him to relate to in terms of everyday experience. Taking that into account, it was really no shock that his expression took on a hint of irony, the smallest of smiles. "I'll keep that in mind next time I enter your kitchen unannounced." He paused for a moment, filing information, cross-referencing. "It happens to you a lot, doesn't it? You're capable of doing things you don't fully understand."

Her gaze shifted toward the window, and there was yet another matter that made him uncomfortable. "No stars. I lived on a ship. I used to sleep in hyperspace." It was the only place he felt completely safe.

Her last comment provoked an immediate stiffness in his neck, an involuntary twitch at the corner of his eye. "It is. Very important." That memory of red dust and blistering heat and crouching in an arena of bodies and pressing his forehead to gray metal, because only one of the fallen mattered -

Too vivid. Force it back.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

She laughed softly. "I think the only things I do fully understand all relate to food preparation. So, yes." It was odd but pleasant to see that faint smile. It felt almost like an accomplishment, somehow, and she slid her hand down a bit more to interlace their fingers.

"Do you think that's really the sun?...a sun, I mean," remembering that they had somewhat different frames of reference for such things. "It feels like real sunlight," (she'd have been in a lot of trouble if it hadn't) "but how can it be, really?"

Her grip on his hand tightened a bit when she saw she'd hit a nerve somehow. Not wanting to pry, she searched for something to distract him, something that wouldn't upset him further, and after a few moments came up with, "I've always had more family than I knew what to do with. Charlie - my stepfather - has this way of taking in strays. Which is more or less how my mom and I ended up with him."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

So having things beyond her control was something that had happened to her before. Perhaps that explained why she wasn't as so deeply disturbed by what had... happened. Last night.

"There are ways to engineer it," he said of the sun. "Ways to replicate the power so that you can feel the heat coming from it, use the energy from it. But," and here was the difficulty with it, "you can normally tell the difference. It's not glaringly obvious, but you can tell it isn't real if you pay attention."

His family wasn't exactly small either. But he hadn't exactly been a part of that family. They all called each other brother within their ranks, but he was the more honest replica, closer to the source, therefore outside. He hadn't really cared. Jango was his father, not his blueprint. Sunshine's talk of her stepfather, however, puts him on a stranger tangent. "The Mandalorians - my cultural heritage - count family to be the most important construct of society. You are not allowed to be without one." How far he had come from that.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Frankly, Sunshine didn't really expect to be in control of much of anything in her life. She hadn't expected control at home, either, not with the normal things - her daily routine, her schedule, her finances, the privacy of her relationships in the claustrophobic closeness of the coffeehouse - and certainly not with the magic that only a panicked flailing after survival had forced her to use.

"I ought to be able to tell if it's not real sunlight," she said. "I get kind of...sick. Without the sun."

She frowned. "How can you be 'not allowed'?"

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

Well, most people did get sick without sunlight. Or at least depressed. But he had a feeling that wasn't what she meant. "Sick how?"

He hadn't phrased this idea of family in the clearest way. "If all of your blood relatives die you are given an adopted family. Someone volunteers to take care of you. The adopted family treats you as if you were blood related to them, the bonds are just as strong. It is required, in their minds." He had often suspected that was why his father had wanted a son, some sense of requirement impressed on him. Strange, as he had not been Mandalorian himself by birthright.

[grumpy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Rae shrugged. "I get weak. My immune system bottoms out. When I was really little, we lived for a year in this tiny underground apartment, and I spent pretty much the whole time crying and getting sick. Took my mom a while, watching me follow the little patch of sun that came in through the one window, to figure out what was wrong. Sunlight is my element - I'd probably be dead if I'd been this long without it."

She listened to his explanation thoughtfully. "Sounds like a good way to handle things. Families are more...fluid where I come from, which has its difficult points as well as the positive."

[lasting-justice.livejournal.com]

"Your element?" he echoed. It sounded like they were getting suspiciously close to magic territory again. Which made him want to ask her a few questions that he had been holding back very well so far. Questions about whether what had happened last night was anything that she was familiar with in her world, anything that would help him to understand what had gained supremacy over him, and how it could be stopped.

He sighed very softly. "I suppose it is a good way. For them. I haven't paid much attention to their rules...." There was a since that hadn't come at the end of that sentence, but it was still hanging there in the small amount of inflection his voice allowed.