Siri (warmingcrystal) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2014-05-16 14:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, obi-wan kenobi, siri tachi |
WHO: Siri & Obi-Wan
WHAT: A "first" encounter
WHEN: Earlier this afternoon (5/16)
WHERE: Nondescript city square
RATING/WARNING: Vague references to death, but otherwise so so safe
STATUS: Complete
If there was one thing that Siri couldn't fault her new home for, it was absolutely the weather. It seemed that the air was always warm, slightly breezy off the ocean, and frankly, it made staying indoors seem almost criminal. Lately, when she wasn't out and about working on whatever case had come across her desk last, she'd taken to picking up her lunch rather than having it delivered, and parking it in the outdoor square a couple blocks from her apartment. It didn't have its own Wifi, no, but Siri had learned to manage being disconnected from the virtual world for at least a few minutes in order to enjoy the sun and the bustle of the city (it was just that she usually managed through her iPad's "reading list" function, is all).
Today was no exception, of course. Having saved a few choice articles for offline browsing and having picked up one of the largest salads known to mankind maybe, Siri had luckily been able to swing a small table, half-shaded, away from the larger, louder groups of businesspeople and students on their lunch breaks. It wasn't that she tended to totally close herself off to being approachable -- except maybe she kind of did sometimes -- it was just that she didn't really need to overhear the latest office gossip if she wasn't being paid to solve the intricate mysteries behind it.
Kind of the best thing about creating your own hours and being your own boss, no? Getting to tune in and out whatever you so choose? It was enough to keep Siri from looking too sullen and reclusive; maybe she was growing to enjoy the area, after all.
Obi-Wan was well-acquainted with being his own boss. It was, in fact, that very thought which had him out today, as he had taken to taking long walks while contemplating his future. His next step, as it were. At times, it seemed like his life was nothing but a succession of next steps, with one thing ending after another, but he was trying very hard not to give into depressive thoughts. Truly, he was in search of that next step. Moving forward was all Obi-Wan knew how to do.
Iced coffee sweating in his hand, he physically made his way down the pavement, counting his options. He could continue in construction, but ever since Faiza’s passing, he’d found it difficult to pick up his tools. After so much work on the cabin they had shared, the smell of sawdust made him ill. Renewing his law license was a possibility, but Obi-Wan was not convinced that was the direction he wanted to go, either. It felt like a step backward, although he knew in his heart that it was not. He hated the anxiety of indecision. All he knew for certain was that he enjoyed his volunteer work at the women’s shelter, but he couldn’t make a career out of fixing ceiling tiles.
The breeze was enjoyable, yes, but it was also occasionally ill-timed. For instance, now. Siri’s nearby lunch neighbor - a young girl who had to have been a student, given her general appearance and disorganization - had gathered her belongings to depart the public square just as a particularly strong gust picked up, and - as it is often wont to do in the worst times - it proceeded to scatter an assortment of papers and notes across the pavement in front of them.
Something in the distressed way the girl looked struck a compassionate chord inside of Siri. She could be known to be cool and offhand at times, but she wasn’t heartless by any means. And it’s not like she was busy. She quickly sprang to her own feet, rushing to help scoop up the carnage of the storm. She hardly even noticed that the two young women had ended up directly in the path of a particular pedestrian now.
“Sorry,” Siri spoke finally, glancing up at the passerby briefly as she handed over the remainder of lost documents to the unlucky owner, who was clearly in a hurry and unable to stay and chat with either of them.
The flutter of papers danced in the corner of Obi-Wan’s eye, but he had already passed before he realized he perhaps ought to have helped. Things appeared to be under control. Although-- and maybe it was only the breeze, or the cup of ice against his palm--but a chill ran up his spine. He moved to look over his shoulder without making it all the way, as though he had talked himself out of it half-way through, and kept on walking until he came to a bench, where he took a seat and pulled out his phone to check his messages. Requests for construction jobs were still coming in.
Maybe she’d only glanced up for a moment, but it had been just long enough to pique her interest in the distracted passerby. Siri watched the man continue on past the scene of the wreckage, watched him settle on the bench, squinted inconspicuously through the sunlight to see if she recognized him. Because something about him was innately recognizable to Siri. Was he from the Bay area? Perhaps he’d been in one of her masters classes. Had she encountered him, later, in one of her investigations? No matter the many options, it was difficult to impossible to tell from here.
Normally, she’d let such a passing whimsy go without a second thought, but for some inexplicable reason…not this one. Returning to her table, Siri gathered up what remained of her salad, closed the cover of her iPad, and made her way through the chatty crowd to the bench. At least from a closer vantage she could figure out if she really did know him from somewhere, or if it was all in her sunsoaked head. “Excuse me,” she imposed as she leveled, gesturing to the empty opposite side of the bench. “Would you mind if I sat?”
Obi-Wan lifted his eyes from the phone. It could not have taken any longer than a second. Yes, in a mere second, everything about the world was changed.
Siri. He was quite fortunate to be sitting down. The dark pupils set in his blue eyes ought to have narrowed in, the way the sun was shining; instead, they widened in response to a fierce shot of adrenaline, the same dose that was no doubt responsible for a sensation very similar to one of Anakin’s aggressive nose dives, the sort that usually caused Obi-Wan to swear he would never ride beside him in a speeder again.
He did not reply. Not because he was lacking words, though he was, but because he had failed to hear her question. It had not been Siri’s voice which had given her away, but a sort of alarm which had gone off: a signature within the Force, as clear as a name, one he had not heard for a long time. A long, long time.
Obi-Wan worked his jaw, but he could not manage a response. Not when the last time he had seen Siri was when she had died in his arms.
As the two strangers (were they strangers?) stared at each other in that bright sunlight, Siri felt...unnerved, almost. Typically she would withdraw the request brusquely, shrug it off and bid her farewells -- not that this was a typical approach she took, in any case, but theoretically that’s what she would do -- but this was somehow different. If anything, the lack of response she was getting only fueled her to keep pressing, as though she were on the verge of a major break in a case, and it just needed that extra nudge.
Truly, it was totally unlike Siri to strike up a cordial conversation with anyone, let alone someone she wasn’t even entirely sure she knew, but on the other hand, it was totally like Siri to be so bold in general.
“Look, I’m sorry for intruding,” she began, more a quick, impatient formality of an apology rather than something she genuinely felt, “but...I feel like we’ve met. Not from these parts, I’m pretty new here. San Francisco, maybe?”
By now her voice was ringing in his ears, but Obi-Wan fought to compose himself, coming to the decision that he would permit no more than five more seconds of silence. Qui-Gon had always told him that he had the brain of a computer. Surely he could survive even a shock such as this.
It was clear that Siri did not remember him. In his experience, the dreams could begin at any time. The fact that he'd not yet come across her on the Network explained some of that. But how he remembered her!
"I've never been to San Francisco," he replied, clearing his throat. His accent was exposed now, British by most accounts, Curoscant-y by others. "I...is it possible we met somewhere else?" He was finding his voice, now. More importantly, he was playing along. "New York, perhaps?"
Siri shook her head, nose slightly scrunched in thought. "No, never been, although I've always felt like I should." How was that possibly relevant? Why would she even bring that up? It wasn't even a fact within her that she was really so conscious of, at any given moment -- more of a passing instinct than anything else, that feeling of consistently feeling more at home in urban metropolises than anywhere else.
Realizing that her invitation to sit probably wasn't to come, Siri did what Siri did best and took the initiative herself, perching on the opposite side of the bench. He seemed to be more open to the discussion now, even offering up his own possibilities, so she didn't feel like she was intruding too much. Still, she didn't settle too much, either, instead remaining in her perpetual state of looking as though she might spring to her feet and flee at any moment.
"It can't have been here; I'd remember the accent if it had been in the last few months. Ever visited Napa, maybe?" That one was particularly unlikely; Siri hadn't been to her hometown since soon after her parents had passed away, and even so, this didn't seem the kind of stranger she'd have known in her adolescent years.
Obi-Wan found himself marveling at her profile, as if seeing her from a new angle was something remarkable. How many conversations had they had while either sitting or standing side-by-side, once he'd realized looking directly into her eyes gave him quite an uncomfortable (but wonderful) feeling--eyes which he'd watched the light slowly seep from, but were once again full of life. Siri was alive! The color which had drained from his face came back full force, turning him red.
Suddenly, Obi-Wan laughed. It was a misplaced sound, one that rang out. He cleared his throat to cover it. "Napa? No, never to Napa. I'm afraid I haven't done much traveling since I moved here, which was years ago. I’m not much of an adventurer.”
If Siri noticed the cough-laugh-cover-up — or the way the man suddenly seemed somewhat florid in the sunlight now — she didn’t make it known. Instead, she merely shrugged, brushing away a stray strand of hair as if it (and/or the topic at hand, it was often hard to tell with her) were an annoying gnat she was suddenly growing bored of. Perhaps she’d been wrong after all, and they’d never met. The stranger seemed cordial enough, and hadn’t yet told her to buzz off, so Siri didn’t really see the harm in continuing their small talk regardless.
“Well. Napa isn’t exactly the world’s greatest place for adventures, anyway,” she admitted with a characteristic wry grin. Stabbing absently at the remains of her salad, she continued after a moment, outstretching her hand in show of appropriate introduction — a concept that had completely escaped her prior to this very moment. “Siri, by the way. Sorry for totally crashing your lunch break.”
Skin-to-skin contact. It never failed to cause Obi-Wan’s spine to stiffen. As a rule, he was cordial, not friendly. His closest friends were routinely greeted with a little more than a slight nod of the head. But never before had he wanted so much to touch someone, just to prove they were solid. Even seeing Anakin again had not produced quite this reaction. Perhaps meeting Padme first had prepared him, or perhaps it was because their parting had been so different.
He quickly wiped his palm on the knee of his pants to dry it and slipped it into hers. “I’m Obi-Wan. It’s only a lunch break if you’re actually taking a break from something. I’m out for a walk because I had nothing else to do.”
Post-handshake, Siri laughed, although it was more of a short sound than anything else, based firmly in her own dry sense of humor. "Speak for yourself! I've hardly been productive all morning, and I'm going to keep calling it a lunch break anyway."
It was nice, this conversation, and frankly, nice conversations weren't something she was very intimately familiar with. Typically, Siri was cold at worst and bitingly sarcastic at best, but for whatever bizarre reason she couldn't pinpoint, talking to this stranger -- Obi-Wan, he'd said his name was -- was somehow immediately easy for her.
She took a bite of her lunch, thoughtfully. "Anyway, it's a good day for a walk," she agreed, before adding, an afterthought with half an eye-roll, "Although, when isn't it a good day for a walk around here? Don't you guys get bored of the weather never changing?"
“No,” replied Obi-Wan with a finality and dryness that had always rivaled Siri’s, if anything ever could, because her severity made him seem nearly affable in comparison. At least, that had been Qui-Gon’s opinion. (Apparently, seeing his old friend could not help but unearth the memories of others who had passed. It was strange knowing that Siri couldn’t possibly recall them herself. Already, Obi-Wan felt like he was guarding a secret.)
He continued. “Although, where I come from, the weather hardly changes either, except that it happens to be bitter cold and damp.” Obi-Wan was not counting Tatooine in this statement.
"Yeah, I'd definitely prefer this variation on the weather never changing," she declared breezily, with little to no obvious concern for whether or not Obi-Wan had any fond feelings of his homeland that might be miffed by her stamping them down so swiftly. "But I still think it'll get pretty monotonous after a while."
Siri knew, as they fell into a pattern of quiet, that now that they'd begun speaking, the small talk would have to continue until one of them was able to excuse him or herself. And she still had half a salad to go. Fortunately and perhaps a bit oddly, she didn't really mind this social necessity now. It was with genuine interest, in fact, that she asked, "What do you do when you're not taking long, leisurely walks through the city streets?"
And Obi-Wan had half of his coffee, although by this point the ice and melted, meaning that what was in his cup was mostly water. He lifted it to take a sip. He could not honestly say he shared the ease of mind he sensed from Siri. He was still recovering from the shock of it all. Having something to occupy his hands was helpful.
“You could say I’m taking a walk to figure that out,” he replied. “If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said I was a carpenter-contractor. I made my living fixing things. Now… well, it may be time for a change.” He added an understated shrug. It wasn’t unusual for Obi-Wan to struggle with discussing himself, but he wanted to avoid the topic of Faiza’s death if only because if he knew Siri, he knew bringing up something to intensely emotional could potentially scare her off. “What about you? From that are you taking a break?”
He was far more interested in learning as much as he could about her: what her job happened to be, where she was living; for good measure, her favorite television show. Why not? He knew from experience that his life here was just as real as his dream existence. This Siri sitting beside him had a history he knew nothing of.
"Private Investigating," she explained simply, with very little of the solemnity that people seemed to often expect from one such a profession. She took another bite, chewed, swallowed, and added, almost cheerily. "But don't worry, I wouldn't have told you that if I were investigating you."
"I don't know, I guess I'm more of an aspiring Private Investigator at this point in the game," she continued briskly, snapping away from the half-joke just as quickly as she had initially arrived at it. "I've been at it for a few years, had built a pretty good portfolio of cases upstate, but it's been challenging finding my footing in a new area. It's all kind-of-word of mouth."
"So you could say I'm taking a lunch break from figuring that out. And here we are."
Obi-Wan chuckled at the half-joke and listened quietly while she spoke at length, enjoying the familiar timbre of her voice. The career suited her. Siri had always had always needed to know what made things tick.
“That explains why you fearlessly struck up a conversation with a total stranger,” he said regarding the job, at last lifting his eyes from a spot they had drifted to on the ground. Obi-Wan turned to look at her more directly. The fine lines in his face softened a bit as he smiled. “Not that I don’t appreciate the company. I take it you moved here fairly recently, then.”
“January,” Siri agreed, nodding a bit in response to the assumption. “I guess you could call it a transfer of sorts.” Although that wasn’t technically true, that was really how she viewed it. She knew deep down that it was safer for her to be out of town for the time being -- after the last danger scare in a case -- but that didn’t mean she hadn’t stubbornly stood fast to the idea that moving hadn’t been her own decision.
Still, she had chosen this area to relocate to, hadn’t she? Siri had actually never spent much time in the region, but it had just seemed like an instinctive choice to her. Who knew? “How long have you been in these parts?”
Obi-Wan could sense that he hadn't been given the whole story, but then again, he had been willing to share even less. His heart, he suddenly realized, felt heavy. The memories and secrets he had to keep from her seemed endless. Just as with Padme and Anakin, there were things it would not be right to share before they were dreamed. (Although he had bent those supposed rules more than once.)
For now, he could only be a very limited version of himself. “Oh, how long has it been, now? Seven, eight years.” It shocked even him how quickly the time had flown by. He lifted a hand to his beard and gave it a scratch. “Before then, it was New York and then London. Scotland, originally. But, like I said, I’m no great adventurer. It has always been out of necessity, one way or another.”
“Still,” Siri pointed out in that matter-of-fact way of hers, with half a shrug, “That’s more of the world than I’ve yet to see. Thought you’d think this job would allow me to see more.” On the contrary, there had always been a part of Siri that felt an intense wanderlust, the need to see as much of the world as possible for herself. She’d just always been so focused, jumping from school to school to career without much time for breathing or adventuring.
As a matter of fact, she was beginning to feel guilty about not being focused enough right now. Siri forked up the last bits of lettuce in her plastic container, already mentally running through the tasks she’d assigned herself for the rest of the day. “I think I have to run soon, but this was really nice. Do you come down here often?”
Realizing she was preparing to move on was like a cold hand upon him. Obi-Wan felt the sensation on his chest, around his arms, even around his throat; he was shackled. Don’t go, he wanted to say. He wanted to say so many things, but he knew they would all be unwise. Taking some comfort in the hope that she would dream soon enough was all he could do.
“I think what we expect of our jobs, and our lives, often goes counter to that actually happens.” With the corner of his mouth turned up, he made the heavy statement in such a way that only he could. It almost had the cadence of humor.
Siri could appreciate that cadence, too, as could -- she assumed -- anyone who had ever suffered inconsolable loss. She gave a half smile back, understanding completely the undertone and all the stories that weren't being told to justify it, and inclined her head slightly with a humorless quiet laugh. "Yeah. Ain't that the truth."
Replacing the lid on her plastic container, she reached up to brush back a strand of hair, lifting her gaze back to Obi-Wan sitting beside her. "I bring lunch down here a lot; hopefully I'll run into you again at some point?" It was posed as a question, but only in the sense that she was curious about this man's comings and goings in the area. She had truly enjoyed his company, and that, frankly, was kind of an unusual thing within Siri.
“If you plan to come by, then I…” Obi-Wan felt his throat thicken a bit, realizing that without knowledge of their history together, what he was on the verge of saying would come across as more than cordial. They’d only just met. In her eyes, he was still a stranger. He was afraid he would have to keep reminding himself of that. In the end, the pause was so brief that it was merely a hitch. “--I suppose I’ll see you here.”