liriael (liriael) wrote in thegalaxy, @ 2016-05-04 13:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | !locale: dermos, liriael d'lander, sinjir fel |
Who: Liriael D'lander & Sinjir Fel
What: Avoiding the past
Where: Dermos
When: Following this holonet post.
Rating: PG
Although she had settled in on Dermos, begun her training, Liriael was surprised at how a small event could yet upset her equilibrium. It did not speak well of her state of mind, and she was berating herself more internally than her Master could verbally at this point. Patience, she could almost hear him say, as she waited just off the landing pad for the Resistance shuttles to arrive. Her training had barely begun yet. She would learn. For this meeting, she was dressed no differently than Sinjir would remember, down to her marked tank top, scuffed mechanics breeches, worn boots. Work needed to be done on Dermos, and no one was exempt. This was no more than a brief interlude in the middle of her duties. Nothing more. And yet, she found herself crossing her arms protectively as she shuttle landed, adjusting her stance, looking around herself for things that could be used as weapons. An attempt to be friendly had meant leaving her blaster in her tiny room. Now she was second-guessing that. Blasters could be handy when one was dealing with Sinjir Fel. Disgusted with herself, she released a sigh along with her nerves, remembering the basics of centering herself and letting her emotions calm. She wouldn’t be goaded today. And he had apologized. Or….he said he wanted to apologize. That was relatively close. The whine of the engines drew her eyes back up the pad, and she straightened up, anticipating the disembarking of the crew, and him. The crew and his escort had formed a rough circle around him, but Sinjir shouldered through them the moment the gangplank touched the ground. His lips were moving, shaping a steady stream of obscenities, though none could be heard from where she stood. He raked a hand through his hair; it stayed standing up in front from a short cowlick that made him look even younger than his years. It almost made her smile; she felt her lips upturning before she could quash the emotion. Their former friendship was ashes, pure and simple, and she wouldn’t look for embers there, she told herself. He looked up as his boots touched the ground, and saw her at once. His expression came in waves, disparate and diametrically opposed emotions writing themselves on his features only to be erased and replaced just as quickly. By the time he reached her, he had managed to school his face into something properly, carefully blank. "Liri," he said. It was a poor greeting, but it was all he had for the moment. "Is there somewhere we can go that this cult and their servants won't follow?" He tipped his head back toward the milling crew. “Sinjir,” she replied, a bit more dryly, but her brows had drawn together in an almost sympathetic study, as if she hadn’t expected him to be as ill at ease. He had always been comfortable in his own skin. Sighing, she continued, a bit more aggrieved, “You know, I’m a part of this cult, and if you recall, that’s part of the reason we,” she emphasized the two of them as he rolled his eyes, “haven’t talked in some time. But yes, there is.” As Liriael led him past the main buildings to what looked like an observation platform overlooking the forest as it dropped away into a ravine, she kept a measured distance between the two of them. On the surface, it was hard to tell if she did it purposefully or it was a byproduct of her wariness. Either way, she waited until they reached the open area, but she didn’t take a seat on one of the benches along the railing. Instead, she leaned against the railing and pressed her palms down on the surface, her fingers tight. “You know, with your skills in the Force, there’s a lot they could teach you, here,” she finally spoke. “Don’t.” He sidled up to the railing beside her. He brought his arms to rest atop the railing, hands folded over its side. The view was remarkable, but his focus was on her; it was plain he had a purpose and he meant to see it through. “I’m not here for you to convert me, okay? If I had my way you’d go back on that transport with me when I leave. Go have a life somewhere. Do things.” He shrugged. “But you’ve made your choice for now, so whatever. I’m more concerned with what made you come back here in the first place.” Liriael sighed. “This is my life, and it always has been. You know this. What can I do out there that I cannot do here?” She waved her hand up at the sky, indicating the rest of the galaxy beyond the blue that arched over them. “Be a pilot? Move from one place to another, never staying in one spot? Get my crew killed because I wasn’t careful?” Her tone wasn’t bitter, surprisingly, just sad. “And then pretend that I don’t feel the Force through every person I meet? That it governs everything I do, and all that I sense? Please tell me, Sinjir, what am I leaving behind by joining the Jedi here?” “Celibacy, for one,” he said. He turned his back to the forest beyond to lean against the railing, his arms folded across his chest. “Two, an outdated religion. Three, completely shapeless clothes. I could go on. I feel the Force, too, but I don’t let that dictate everything about me. I don’t shut myself off from the galaxy. Which is basically on fire right now, in case you and the hermits haven’t noticed. You’re avoiding the issue. Which makes sense, seeing as how you came here to hide from whatever happened to Cassie.” “Celibacy and my clothes?” Liriael slanted a withering look at him. “That’s what bothers you, that you don’t like my pants and you can’t get into them? Furthermore, it’s not about religion, but you could stand to learn a bit more about what it is.” She released her breath through her nose, striving for calm. “Sinjir, the last thing I am doing is hiding from what happened to Cassie, or from what is happening in the galaxy. None of us are hiding; we’re training. I’ve been getting by with my rudimentary skills using the Force, just like you have,” she pointed out, “but here I could actually learn how to properly channel it. Do you think it’s better if I let grief and anger send me on a crash collision with revenge on the Knights of Ren? Wait….” She held up her hand. “You probably do. And I can tell you, I wouldn’t survive.” He held up an index finger. “Wait a minute. If you think what bothers me about you running off to join a monastery is that we won’t sleep together, you’ve got every last part of this -- and me -- completely wrong. Clearly they already sapped your sense of humor, Liri. Don’t let them get your common sense, too.” He drummed his fingers against one bicep. “I’m not going to tell you to go toe to toe with the Knights. But doing something is better than running away and hoping the problem fixes itself.” “You know, I could have sworn there was supposed to be an apology in here somewhere,” Liriael answered, feeling sharp disappointment lance through her as they fell back into the same arguments as before. “Sinjir, you got me out of a very bad situation once, and we were good friends, back then. But you’re still pitting yourself against everything I believe in. There’s no ‘them’.....this place, the Jedi, this is part of me. It always has been, and you’ve always known that. There has never been a step I took before that didn’t involve my learning more about the Order and what came before, and how I could best use my own abilities. How I could not give in to the Dark Side. But you cannot stop ridiculing that.” She was surprised that it still hurt, brought a lump to her throat. “I’m not running away, I’m running towards a future in which I can help fight these problems, like the Knights of Ren, where I don’t need to hide on a backwater planet in the Outer Rim and hope they don’t track me down and kill me.” She took a shuddering breath. “You let your temper destroy the trust we once had. This isn’t going to regain it. If all you've come to do is to talk me out of joining the Jedi, you will fail.” “Shit. You even give speeches like them, now.” He drew a long, deep breath. “Okay. Look. I am sorry for how things fell out. That doesn’t change what I think about all this.” He waved a hand at the buildings gathered around, at the people far off in the distance. “But I’m still on your side, whether you believe that or not. And if there’s something I can do to help you get some closure for what happened to Cassie, I want to do it.” For a long moment, Liriael was silent, looking away from him and towards the trees, as her jaw clenched against whatever emotion she was holding back. Finally, she said, a bit thickly, “I’ve been here for a week, Sinjir. A week. What you are hearing, it’s me. It’s my thrice-damned words. You talk about me like I’m….like I’ve been replaced, and there’s just this shell that’s speaking to you. Why do you have to do that? Do you really think I’m not inside this body anymore? That somehow, the Jedi have erased me?” She turned her head back to meet his eyes again, although it took effort. “How can you look at me and never see me?” “I do. But I see them, too, hanging on you like a badly tailored suit.” He shook his head. “Be careful with that anger, Liri. You know they don’t like that.” “Is that what you sense, anger? You’ve become so out of touch, Sinjir, with what is right in front of you.” Uncaring how he might react, Liri put the flat of her hand on his chest, her fingers splayed. “You and I both know the Force, and at one time, we could feel what the other was feeling. You burned that, before, but that doesn’t make me angry, and it doesn’t make me afraid.” Under her hand, all of the myriad emotions blossomed through an old, damaged, ill-used connection. Instead of anger, there was sadness, betrayal, and an affection that had been trampled and singed. “I will be a Jedi someday,” she said, quietly, “but that’s not all that I am, or will be.” Everything in him wanted to pull away from her touch. She dredged up too much, dug too deep into an old wound he had thought healed. A deep sense of loss rekindled in his chest, but there was no contrition in it. Disappointment showed plainly on his face. He reached for her, his hand circling the wrist she’d raised to him. He lifted her hand from him, releasing her when her fingertips slid from his chest. “I hope you’re right,” he said. “I want you to prove me wrong. No-one will be happier than me if you do.” Liriael struggled to not let the pain of the rejection show on her face, as she withdrew her hand completely, even backing up a step to better put distance between them. “Don’t cut people out because they aren’t what you think they should be, Sinjir. Everything that made us friends before is still there, but you have to accept that everything that made us enemies is as well. Make your peace with that. I won’t ever hold it against you if you never pursue your talents, if you stay exactly like this forever. But I expect the same.” Sinjir snorted. “If I don’t pursue my talents? What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?” Frustrated, he threw up his hands. “I don’t know why I thought this would be a good idea. I didn’t cut you out, Liri. That was mutual. And now? I reached out to you. I came to you, offering to help. It that doesn’t make it clear that I’m accepting this ridiculous choice of yours, that I’ve made peace with it, I don’t know what will.” “Fine.” She didn’t close the distance, kept the insulation between them, but there was no answering frustration in her. She only sounded resigned. “Believe it or not, and I am sure I am not making it easy, but I am glad you actually came here. I can’t make it easy, Sinjir. We’re both disappointed in the other. Part of the reason I am here is to learn how to let emotions like that go. I already wanted to let it go, but there’s still a difference between telling myself that and then doing it.” “You handle it your way, I’ll handle it mine.” For all the harshness of his words there was a softness to his tone, a slight backing down from the hostility of before. His arms uncrossed. He brought his elbows to rest on the railing behind him, the hard line of his shoulders easing somewhat. “So now that that’s behind us…” He laughed, unsteady, uncertain. He pushed off from the railing and walked over to her. “What can I do?” When he laughed, an equally cautious smile flitted across her mouth for a moment. “About Cassie? I’m not sure. I feel like she should at least have had some sort of memorial, but I don’t know how that was handled where she came from. I haven’t even been able to return to Coruscant to claim her body, if I had something in mind for a funeral. I do know that no one else has a claim….she listed me as her next of kin, back when she and I started flying the Vagabond.” Her shoulders wilted a little. “Of course, that has little to do with closure, but that has never made much sense to me…..she’s gone and that is that.” Sinjir shook his head, but for once let the sleeping dog lie. “We should go to Coruscant, then,” he said. “They may not have incinerated her body yet, especially if there’s any ongoing investigation around her murder. I’ll get in touch with some people and see what I can find out. Then we’ll have whatever memorial you think is right for her.” He flashed a tentative smile. “I vote one with an open bar, but I’ll leave that decision to you.” “You’re going to hate hearing this, but I’m fairly sure I’m not supposed to drink.” Liriael attempted to make it clear as a joke, even holding the kernel of truth. She likewise did not want to go down that path again, another strike he would have against the Jedi. Still, it seemed to work; Sinjir laughed aloud, and covered his face with his hand. Falling more serious, she continued, “If you can find out for me, that would be a big help. I’m not sure if the Knights of Ren are still looking for me, so I haven’t put myself out there yet. Not for me, as much as for my remaining crewmember. I don’t want to put him in danger.” “They’re tenacious,” he said, “but Coruscant is still deep core. They might be bold enough to pull this shit once, but twice would be pushing it. Even their comms team isn’t good enough to clean up that mess.” He reached out and gave her arm a little squeeze; she smiled again, briefly. “I’ll take care of this. If everything’s clear, I’ll even send a pilot I trust to come and pick you up. It’s not safe for you to take the Vagabond there again. At least not for a while.” Nodding, Liriael looked relieved. “I worry that one person’s death is falling below anyone’s radar, since the destruction of Hosnian Prime still is dominating. But if we can get Cassie out of there, give her a memorial...that will help. Right now, I have the Vagabond stashed on Tatooine. I didn’t want it tracked here to Dermos.” Meeting his gaze, she added, “I would owe you for this, Sinjir. It means a lot.” “Don’t thank me until it’s done,” he said. “I’ll keep you up to speed on the holonet. Just keep a watch out and be ready when the ship arrives.” He paused, chewing his tongue as though silence did not sit well with him. “Take care of yourself in the meantime, okay? And thanks for seeing me.” By comparison, her calm radiated stillness to his anxious movements. “I would never not see you, Sinjir,” she answered, quietly. “There is a lot that we haven’t resolved, but I will always try. I will fail, likely a few times,” she added, with a quirk of her lips, “but I won’t ever turn my back on you unless I must for the greater good. I can promise you that.” “Good,” he said. “The sentiment’s mutual.” His smirk was deep, and hid many things in its shadow. He raised a hand and waved goodbye, and left her alone in the courtyard. Liriael watched him go, knowing better than to offer to escort him around the Jedi enclave. He would only take it as an insult, as if she didn’t think he would behave. Stifling a sigh, she only returned his wave, and then took a moment to meditate before she returned to her duties. |