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....

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[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)))