a good space boy from a good space family (pethdorn) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2017-09-25 18:00:00 |
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Beneath the towering height of the temple on Yavin 4, there was a winding complex of tunnels, chambers, and passages - the only cave-like things which Poe had ever sought out. Closed, damp spaces had never appealed to him as much as sunlight and vistas and anywhere that gave him a free rein, but the temptation of walking in the literal footsteps of his heroes had proven stronger than his desire to bask, and to breathe free. He'd climbed down into the dark, with his hand torch and his lunch hanging from his belt, and he'd allowed himself to believe that there, hundreds of meters below the expansive ground floor that still bore carbon scoring from its brief life as a Rebel launch bay, he was exploring the hidden history of the the beginnings of a great era. The smell of soaking, stringy moss - the drip, drip in the silence - the unnatural cold and wet weight of the air - even the legends of some long-dead, now-uncorporeal Sith lord had failed to chase him away. He'd learned - well, not every centimeter of those halls. Not even ten percent of them, probably. But he'd gone in far enough to feel he belonged there, and to leave his mark - often literally. Future tourists making pilgrimage to the Rebel base on Yavin 4 would read his graffiti. ... It was mostly tasteful. Here, the caves were alien, uneven, treacherous - and, most importantly, not his own. There were men and women scattered throughout, lurking, perhaps, around every corner, and while some of them he'd have happily stumbled across, eager to collect them and take them to the relative safety and comfort he'd established, there were others of whom he was less certain. He felt like a trespasser. This place belonged to no one, no one he respected - but that only meant that his friends and fellows had no choice but to carve out their own little faults and corners. He had begun this journey hoping to create a kind of commune. Now - he was just praying he could make it back to camp without seeing a single soul. To return to one of the men he'd often imagined treading the same flagstones he'd slid across, as a boy in an abandoned base. To bring him a canteen of water. How long he'd been walking, he couldn't have said - until he heard the lapping of water, and found himself back in the vaulted space that held the cornucopia. He avoided it entirely, sticking to the outskirts of this room. Anyone who was still there probably didn't need his help, and he had no desire to provoke any misunderstandings by sauntering up to anyone else's camp. It was a long, careful, quiet slosh to another section of dry land (with near-constant jolts of fear that somehow he'd lost his sense of direction) and another dark and unsteady passage to - well, he didn't know where to. He heard the next body of water before his boot slipped into it. He waded in, knee-deep, cautious; and he scooped up a couple palmfuls to sniff at it. Not sulfurous. Not saline. He dipped Bail's canteen into it, dropped in an iodine tablet, capped it, and shook; it became a violent motion, rough and angry and threatening to send the thing sailing off into the black. Water. Good. Great. Fantastic. After all these years, that's what he was carrying back to one of the people he'd spent his entire life revering: maybe a liter of something that was technically potable, but tasted like shit. And he was fucking pissed. Here, at least, he was alone. It wasn't a condition he often prized; solitude was misery, the kind of clawing relentless feeling that he'd heard people describe in their attempts to convey claustrophobia. He hated it. But, like any good soldier - like any good person - he felt the weight of his duty heavily, and there were only certain isolated moments when one could shrug it off long enough to indulge in a slump. So he did - he slumped against the rock, seated just at the water's edge, and as the chemical purifier worked its way through the water at his side, seeping through all its invisible agents of infection, rendering it flat and bitter and wretchedly tepid but fine, he allowed himself - mostly the same thing. He'd fucked this up pretty solidly, but he wasn't about to die; he wasn't about to kill anyone. He was inert. And he could make that work, for a little while - for as long as he had a job to do. So he got over it, and he stood up, and he pretended he was following the well-known slope of the temple's walkways out into the sun, and he went back, taking his disgusting, lukewarm, stained, but decidedly adequate water back with him. |