padme_n (padme_n) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-02-09 19:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | james kirk, padme amidala |
Who: Padme and Jim Kirk
What: While thinking on the beach, Padme catches Jim with his telescope. Stargazing ensues.
Where: Laguna Beach
When: Tonight
Ratings/warnings: None
Status: Complete
It had been a very long few weeks. Not in a bad way, per se, but having your mind open to concepts such as ‘aliens’ and ‘the multiverse’ and ‘you have existed in many different timelines’ was a lot. She tried to focus on her work, focus on her recent friendships (and that was also slightly confusing, considering the not-so-small idol crush she still had on Anakin), focus on whatever but no.
Sometimes, there was nothing quite like burying your feet in the cold sand, and staring out in the water, especially when thinking was all you wanted to do. Normally, Padmé would find her answers on the waves, but when it was late (and cold), she just wanted to stare and think. And since she wasn’t sleeping all that great, there she was, on the beach close to her house, just looking.
After a while, she leaned back on her blanket and stared up into the sky. Being so close to the city, the stars weren’t nearly as bright as they could be. One day she’d like to go to a dark sky reserve, see the stars as they were meant to be. For now, she’d take what she could get.
No matter how many times Jim stood on the bridge of the Enterprise, or how many planets and far flung stars he’d visited, there was just something primal natural about old-school astronomy. There were a variety of expensive hobbiest telescopes with advanced features, and though Jim had a few, he preferred the first one he’d bought with his own money. It had a large aperture and wide lends, and even after fifteen years it still gave a stellar view.
His boots crunched in the sand as he walked down the beach. Other than taking a boat forty miles out to sea, or driving up into the mountains, this was probably the best place to see the stars, even with California’s light pollution. Maybe he’d take a boat next time, but he’d need some kind of device to stabilize the telescope…
“Not a bad idea,” he murmured to himself, as he started to set up a tripod.
Padme watched curiously when Jim got near. It took a few moments for her to recognize him as the space man (or so she’d nicknamed him in her head). When he took out the tripod, Padme got up to her feet and brushed the sand off her hands. Slipping on her shoes, she walked over to him, her arms hugging herself for warmth. “Need any help?”
He started, so into what he was doing he hadn’t noticed anyone else around. Straightening, Jim looked in the direction of the voice and smiled. “Hey. If you could hold that leg of the tripod there, it would help.”
He pointed. “I haven’t figured out what I’m going to look at yet, if you have any ideas.”
Reaching out, Padmé reached for the tripod and did what Jim asked. “I’ve never actually looked through a telescope before,” she admitted. Standing back up, she gave a delicate shrug of her shoulders. “I guess I’ve never been interested enough in what the stars look like. Do you have any suggestions? And before you say it,” she added, holding up a finger, “I don’t even know where to find any constellations. I think I know of….the big dipper? And isn’t there a bear one?”
“First time for everything. Who knows, maybe something will capture your imagination!”
Jim pointed into the sky. “Venus there. Mars there. Jupiter.” He named a few stars that should be easy enough to see, pointing them out without the help of any aide. He glanced at her with a smile. “There’s a great app for smartphones that you can hold up and it will point out what star or planet or celestial body is and where. I just have a few of those memorized.”
Padmé looked up at where he was pointing and tried as best as she could to see what he was saying but it was a little bit hopeless. “It all looks like bright lights in the sky.” She tried a little harder, even going so far as to squint, maybe make it look like the pictures in books, but no luck. “I’m guessing with a telescope, things look a bit better?”
“They are bright lights in the sky. That’s the first thing to learn.” He grinned at her, and checked the telescope one more time. “Give me a second…”
Jim adjusted the telescope until it was pointing at Mars. Then he stepped back. “Okay, take a look. You should be able to make out the shape, and also the shapes on it. Tell me if you can guess what you’re looking at.”
WIth a smile on her face, she stepped forward and looked into the telescope. What she saw surprised her. “Oh!” She looked up at Jim, her smile widening before she returned her attention to the image. It was such a unique experience that she found herself really taking a moment to appreciate what she was seeing.
The colours were surprisingly vivid, and so different than those on Earth even though it was red. She felt a shiver go down her back, something tickling her memory but she shook that thought off. Her hand let go of the telescope as she straightened up. With a smile, she nodded her head. “That was amazing.”
Reactions like that were one of the reasons Jim did this kind of thing, even if he hadn’t planned on hosting an impromptu astronomy party. Seeing discovery light up someone’s face, even if it was as simple as one of their sister planets. “We might still have time to look at Venus, but she’s always hard to view this time of year. I think..”
He pulled out his phone and consulted it. “There are a few other stellar objects we can see, as well as distant stars. Or nearby ones, mostly.”
Jim glanced up, eyes drawn to one particular star that he knew the location of by heart.
Padme followed Jim’s view and looked up. While the stars were meaningless to her, there was an air of wistfulness on him. “You really weren’t joking when you said you had a ship, and you could take me to Saturn, huh.” The more she spoke to the Network, the more she realized how over her head she was. So far, her only Dream was of being a Queen ...and then later a Senator. She didn’t know if they were connected, or they were simply two other realities. It didn’t seem nearly as interesting though as some of the other Dreams people had.
Jim made a few adjustments to the telescope, then took out what looked like a flip phone and spoke quietly into it; something about dropping a cloaking screen. He slipped the device back into his pocket. “I wasn’t joking. Take a look for yourself.”
Through the viewfinder hung a pearly white ship hanging in low orbit
Padme obliged and peered through, managing to stop herself from gasping. A spaceship. Anakin had mentioned how he was helping with a spaceship, but somehow she hadn’t really put the pieces together. Even though he was talking about aliens too.
She really needed to stop being surprised by all this.
“How did you get down here if your ship is up there?”
“Enterprise is equipped with transporters. They break an object or person down into the base atoms and then reconstruct them at the destination.” He grinned at her. “Safer than an airplane. And in the event we can’t transport, the ship is equipped with shuttles about the size of a large van.”
Jim was proud of his ship, and if given the chance would talk about her for hours.
That seemed excessively large. It almost reminded her of a cruise she took once with her family, how she felt unbelievably small compared to this enormous vessel, capable of holding thousands of people. How big could the ship be if it had several shuttles that big?
“ Enterprise .....I don’t know, that whole transporter thing sounds a little freaky. How do you know you’ll be put back together again? It sounds like a ‘ship of theseus’ situation. How many of those atoms are still my atoms? What if I have some Jim atoms in there?” She was being cheeky to belie her nerves. Transporter? Crazy.
Deciding not to tell Padme about transporter accidents, Jim smiled. “They’re still your atoms. But I could ask you what happens if the brakes fail on your car? How can you know they’ll always work all the time?”
So he was being cheeky too.
“Trusting my brakes feels a bit easier to do since, you know, I’ve been around cars my whole life. I don’t know about spaceships yet.” Padme was smiling though. When he had brought it up on the Network, she’d been pretty adamant that she did not want to experience that.
Now, well, she was slowly leaning towards it. Not quite there yet, but maybe soon. It would be pretty neat to see the stars in space. “But now you have me wondering if I should maybe walk everywhere. Me and my legs, we’re pretty attached. I think I can trust them to take care of me.”
“That’s true,” Jim agreed. “But I’m not going to beam you up without your permission, unless its an emergency. But the view is fantastic.”
He let his eyes roam up her legs, then winked. “Yes, I think they’d do just fine in taking you around.”
Padme gave a smirk and a small roll of her eyes. She may have been wearing yoga pants, but she knew they looked good. “Keep talking, Casanova. Flattery will get you everywhere.”
Pro-tip, Yoga Pants were hot. “I only speak the truth.”
Jim gave her a bright, glittering smile. “So what do you do, besides get accidentally interrupted on the beach at night.”
There were many things to do on the beach at night. Such as astronomy.
“I plan weddings,” she said proudly. “And I surf. It’s my stress-relief, and gets me out of my office into the sunshine. I’m more of a night owl though, so this?” She waved at the night sky. “This is my jam, so the kids say. I love being out in the middle of the night, just thinking and relaxing. This beach is one of my favourites to go to since I live over there.” She gestured at a modern gated building across the street, barely visible from where they were. “I feel safe enough to come here.” Safer now that she was learning how to defend herself. “How about you?”
Wedding planning and surfing. There were a precious few people in Jim’s past he’d go so far as to marry. And surfing? He’d once surfed the rings of Rigel.
“I don’t think you’re old enough to say ‘so the kids say’,” he said, his grin only spreading.
“You mean besides amateur astronomy? I teach self-defence and wilderness survival.”
“At some point you have to admit you’re no longer hip and with it,” she replied with a grin. “And oh right -- I forgot you had mentioned that, about self-defence. I didn’t know about the wilderness survival though. I love hiking, I try to do it regularly, and I go camping occasionally, but usually in a campground or somewhere surrounded by people. Don’t know if I really want to go camping out in the middle of nowhere. There’s scary things in the woods at night.” She was joking ..mostly. The woods did look spookier in the dark.
“Maybe when I’m forty.” Despite his smile, that actually brought up a little bit of hurt to him. Jim had never quite gotten over getting old in his dreams.
The idea of dying quietly in his sleep, instead of doing something that mattered. It hadn’t mattered just what -- even making a difference for one person would have been enough.
That, in the end, it had been a whole planet? That had been worth dying for. They’d never met him, and he’d never met them, but that didn’t matter at all. But he still felt like he’d let himself get too old…
“I love camping and hiking. I do plenty of that that doesn’t involve taking soccer moms and students into the desert.” He winked.
“I bet.” A sudden gust of wind chilled her, and she automatically hugged her arms to herself. Her jacket, forgotten on her towel, suddenly called to her. “Well, thanks for the quick ana -- astronomy lesson.” Did she almost say anatomy? Oops. “I’m starting to get cold though.” She lifted her foot up and wiggled her toes. “No shoes and no jacket make Padme go something something.” She gave a small wave and a smile. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around though, Jim.”
Jim was always up for anatomy lessons, but he kept that to himself. It was only polite. “I guess you’ll be seeing me around.”
He waved her off with a smile, and then turned back to his telescope.