sixthiterationlogs | Slow Rider, Slow Rider, Move On a Little More

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Slow Rider, Slow Rider, Move On a Little More

WHO: Everyone
WHERE: 6I's Town Hall
WHEN: July 10th
OPEN TO: Everyone who wants in. There will be one subheader for welcoming back the group and one for the actual meeting
WARNINGS: Nothing so far; please add headers in the comment subjects if something does come up that could be problematic

The return is, when everything is said and done, uneventful. The group who went to explore the break in the canyon walks back into the village in the early afternoon, laden down with most of the supplies they'd brought with them and without any obvious injury. There's some scratches, a couple bruises, but whatever had happened to seal them away from the village for a week definitely didn't happen to them, and they're not buzzing with any news so world-shattering that everyone needs to be collected and reported to at once. There's enough time for the group to separate and grab showers, clean clothes, and something to eat, while the word passes from person to person that the explorers have returned and that there's going to be a meeting right after dinner for them to explain what they've found and answer questions.

At the appointed time, the five of them are there, looking less ragged, and ready to talk. They've brought a few things back with them to show the others in the village, but all in all there's just not a lot to show about the other side that's different - except for that one, giant thing. But the non-changes are going to be shocking enough for most people, and decisions have to be made about what to do with the information they have now.

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"You could have just told me you wanted to do it yourself," Kira doesn't quite chide, "instead of slinking off mid-lie about errands you never do." It's nice to see Bodhi again: it's nice to see Bodhi under the layers of hermit-scruff, closer to the man he invited to live in his house months ago.

It's a strange thought: he's known Bodhi longer than he'd known Casey. Longer than he got to know Ren, almost as long as Jyn. He might even be starting to understand him.

Just starting.

Kira's sitting at the righted kitchen table when Bodhi returns from his grooming. The clothes make sense--not in a familiar way, but as a gift, and Bodhi seems much improved by his trip across the divide. No weapons or running from magical badgers needed, it seems. "Would you make some of that stronger tea," he asks, rather than getting up to offer food and something made with the regular kettle. There's still a wheeze in his chest from a cold he caught in the rain, and this time he's not going to overwork himself into a bout of pneumonia.

Edited 2017-07-11 18:35 (UTC)

"I didn't really want to do it myself until it was in my way," he says pithily, holding onto the certain wave of self-satisfaction. He doesn't want to risk letting go of the mood, because he can't imagine it'll come back easily.

Asking for tea is a good way to keep it rolling. Soothing and satisfying, and he'd been wanting a cup for himself anyway. With a nod, he pulls the set free, setting out the bronze pot and all its little accouterments. One of the cups did crack during the quake, but the cups were never as important as being able to go through every step the right way. His whisk is a little bent and one of the brazier's little legs has a slight wobble to it now, but it's a small issue, easily worked around. That happens. As he efficiently snaps every piece onto the table, he asks, "Spiced, smoked, or fermented?" For a moment, he sounds so much like his father (or maybe it's just that now he's dressed like him) that he alarms himself a bit, but he tries to ignore it.

"It's always been in your way," he argues, shifting to curl up better in his chair now that he knows he doesn't have to move from it. The sleeves of his red sweater are stretched out--all of it is stretched out, loaned to people taller and wider and eventually put back on him in the chilly nights after the quake. "In the way of people knowing I shack up with a handsome explorer who makes tea, instead of some hermit I coaxed out of the woods."

Flipping the ends of his sleeves over his hands, he sinks his chin into them over his knees, sighing like it's been very hard to live with the blow to his image.

"Spiced, please."

Bodhi snorts quietly. "Sounds like it was in your way," he says as he examines his bricks of tea. The spice one is the most depleted by a narrow margin. He already made a rule for himself that he won't horde the stuff, or he'd be afraid to ever touch it. The bricks would sit wrapped and perfect and utterly useless. If this is the last taste he or anyone else will have of Jedha (even if it's imaginary, created by whatever hands send the gifts), he wants those tastes frequent and widespread. He snatches a bit of smoldering wood from the stove for the brazier and snaps off a corner of the tea brick without missing a beat. "Anything exciting while I was gone?"

"I'm glad you're realizing my way is the one that matters," he answers imperiously, still hunkered down in a stretched and fraying sweater like the mulish prince of a very raggedy kingdom. Considering the splintered couch frame and the ugly scratches and scuffs on his throne, that's more or less what he is in his own home.

The gentle smoke and the spice of the tea is part of it, but it's more memory than actual smell through the lingering cold. "Credence made a friend his own age. Granted, they were trapped in a cave for two days, but whatever works. I caught a cold, Hoshi found a coin in the mud I spent an hour cleaning off of him. Very thrilling."

While it's good that Credence has more friends, Bodhi was under the impression that the two of them were friends his own age already, unless he's seriously miscounted somewhere along the line. Trapped in a cave is... probably something he should bring up to Credence, if at all. It sounds excruciating, of course, and his protective instincts flare at the mere thought, but at least it's over. He zeroes in on what he can actually effect here and now. Looking up from grinding the tea into Kira's cup, he nods sagely. "Very ambitious of Hoshi. I'm glad he's holding up the initiative, gathering important evidence..." He might be too easily amused.

"He's good for anything shiny," Kira agrees, gaze moving down the table to his bird. Hoshi is perched on the opposite edge like a fluffy gargoyle, likely hoping more insects will come quite literally out of the woodwork, as they had in the rainy days after the quake. "He can join the next expedition over."

Flicking his gaze back to Bodhi, he doesn't ask about the trip yet, knowing if he takes his time there will still be a meeting at some point to discuss anything of interest. Sartorial choices, on the other hand, are always worth comment. "Are those clothes from the box?"

Bodhi looks down consciously. "Um." Well, the short answer is easy. He nods to buy himself time, not sure how much else he should say. Not because it's a secret, but because it's hard to gauge how much Kira would care to know, how much dismal baggage he can keep out of any explanation he could give. He swallows, reaches for every scrap of optimism he's wrung out of the past few days, and says simply, "I always sort of thought I'd turn into my father, but I can't remember why I minded that idea." He sets the finished tea in front of Kira with something like the flair he remembers from the shop in what seems like someone else's life.

"Parents make us unhappy sometimes," he says, with all the ennui of a person who hasn't breathed through their nose in a week. One hand escapes the press of his chin to fit around the mug, just absorbing the heat of it for now. "Usually because young people are stupid and pick dangerous things to make them happy, and it's our parents' jobs to make sure we live long enough to know why we were stupid."

If he's going to be either of them, it's his mother, and he'd spent too long thinking he wouldn't grow up into anything at all to mind that. "I think every person with parents has felt like they'll be more--something, than them. More fun, more successful, less ignorant." He looks down at his mug. "Better at tea."

"It had a lot more to do with where than who." Living through the slow decline of NiJedha had really cramped his teenage rebellion. Unless you actually went out and joined the then-disorganized insurgencies, it was hard to get much of a sense of self from testing boundaries. No need to turn sheer orneriness on parents when the world was slowly crumbling everywhere around. It was being tied to the corpse of the Holy City that he'd fled from, a resignation to the decline, a reluctance to defy duty and a certain conditional security in the hope of something better.

Instead of explaining any of that, he starts a second cup for himself and shrugs. "I'll never be half as good at tea, though."

Even when he had a sense of Bodhi's ruminations--perhaps because he had a sense of it--Kira never prodded him to elaborate on the fragments he spoke aloud. A person's story is their own, not to be forced out, and his large not-friend seems all the more reticent of a man.

Kira isn't half as interested in Baze's take on whatever happened to them. If Jyn were here, she'd probably explain it like a cup having the entire contents of a jug poured into her, overflowing with grief and errant detail. All he would have to do is ask.

Resting his chin in an idling hand, on an idling elbow at the table's edge, Kira watches Bodhi shrug and deflect, fussing with the tea set and letting the crytpic remark settle.

Kira is a little tired of cryptic remarks, giving or receiving. "You never talk much about where you grew up, or why you left with the others."

Bodhi goes very quiet for a moment. For all he doesn't talk very much, he tends to create a faint buzz around him, the assorted incidental sounds of fidgeting, humming a note or two, drumming his fingers, bumping into stuff. He's just never... still. For a moment, his heartbeat is too loud in his ears and and he bites down on his lip hard enough to hurt. The answer he wants to give hovers on his tongue. No, I don't. And Kira would probably relent.

But he doesn't ask much. A cup of tea every few weeks, Bodhi's share of household chores (performed clumsily and at odd times), time spent with the dog. Bodhi hadn't realized until now how much depended on the agreement that seemed to subsist between them--don't ask me and I won't ask you. Share no burdens, accept none. After he wrestles for a moment, he finishes the cup of tea and sits down at the table.

"I didn't. I mean, leave with them, I was gone as soon as the pilot's academy would... I met the others--" Jyn, Cassian, Baze, Chirrut, K, staggeringly significant but total strangers, too. "Days before I got here. Not completely sure, a lot of hyperspace jumps and, well, things were..." He really did mean to give a true answer, but he's already clearly getting lost.

Kira sips his barely cooled tea, savoring the spice, letting it be part of the answer. He doesn't hurry Bodhi along, or give any indication that what he's managing is insufficient. Anything is fine: even nothing is fine. He doesn't need to know, he just didn't want Bodhi to think he never asks because he doesn't care.

Other people, maybe. But not someone he makes a home with.

"Jyn told me a bit, of her side of things." It was another reason not to ask--he knew enough to get by. Eventually he fit a few pieces together. "Not everything, obviously. She had her own odd ideas of home to unpack." He has another sip, and sets the mug down, both hands in their sleeves wrapped around, keeping it warm, keeping his fingers safe from the heat. "I didn't know you were from that planet, but then the tea came, and you mentioned a desert, and it kind of--"

He's getting off the point. It doesn't matter how he puts things together. "I'm sorry, that there's so little to get back to."

Bodhi wonders absently what Jyn's side of things was like. Not something he'd have thought to ask, but he's sure it wasn't much like his own. She was so certain. She was, well, Galen's daughter. Never freezing up in something colder than terror, never losing the thread of a task from the sheer immensity of what was in front of them. He envies it a little.

He stops a long moment to breathe in the smokehouse scent of his tea, finding a place where he can be calm, if not quite collected. "There was never anything for-- Going home wasn't an option. That, that... That didn't bother me, until the option was-- It doesn't have much do do with me and what I want. Most people, um, well, I wouldn't even... wouldn't think of me as Jedhan anymore. It's just that there aren't better options less." Thinking of the end of a city in a wave of heat and smoke leaves no room for anything as small and insignificant as him. "I was there to carry a message, that's... That's all."

Until the option was gone, Kira imagines the thought completing. He doesn't know much about leaving home, having only the canyon to really compare it to. He'd barely visited the mainland for anything but odd jobs or accompanying his mother to see friends of the family.

But he understands how absence changes a thing. Absence of a friend, absence of safety. He doesn't know what he'd say, asked about home as he'd left it. Bodies in the streets and a virus still hidden behind biohazard tarps and locked gates. There were entire city blocks even the experts tread carefully around.

He'd still want it to be there when he got back, gunfire and all. "You did deliver it, though," he offers, surmising as much from Jyn's winding accounts.

"Not in time to do NiJedha any good." Or, most likely, the entire moon. It was big enough to hold onto its atmosphere and have enough activity in the crust for people to live there, more or less comfortably, but a blow like that must have damaged more than just the surface. Planet killer indeed.

Lucky Leia hasn't mentioned Alderaan yet.

"If anyone--If I'd been able to get someone to listen..." He's not allowed to let himself off the hook. The flightsuit from the bottom of the box reminded him of that. "It was only a few days, but..."

"At least you tried," and his shrug is more a way to sink into himself, his sweater, his tea. There are still flashes of chills and aching joints, but he thinks he's mostly over the cold. Spring water and antibiotics never hurt, though he's been trying to lean on the former and save the latter.

"A lot of people give up; a lot of people wouldn't have listened. You can't know what it takes to convince everyone." He'd learned that at an early age: sometimes fate was fate because you couldn't steer a person off a path, even if you gave them the choice. He'd told who he thought might listen about why they were leaving the shop, but only so many understood that it might extend its claws out to them. He can't imagine trying to tell all of New York City not to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving, especially without being able to give a concrete reason as to why.

"There's failure and there's spectacular, catastrophic, cascading failure," Bodhi says, one of those rare moments of lucidity where he finishes a thought firmly and deliberately. It's one he's quite used to. "I don't know if someone else--I couldn't do it, not in time to save a city, at least one other planet..." Scarif may not feel like much of a loss, but there was probably more there than an Imperial base. He can't remember if there was any kind of indigenous population or not. It's not the sort of thing that gets brought up in Imperial circles.

"From what I've heard," Kira says carefully, because he has only heard, and from one person: "it was a much bigger thing than any of you. Set in motion before you were even born." And if anyone knows a bit about life on that scale, it's his mother, and by some extension, himself. Being that deeply connected to the world around you didn't make it any smaller. Everything was part of a bigger picture. There was meaning in failure, held against the rest.

He sets the mug down and does his best to regain breath through his nose, clear away the last of the cold. "It doesn't matter if someone else was more capable, they didn't try. They didn't sign up for it, just like this time. You went and you did something, that matters."

That he could be talking to himself about his own arrival doesn't track, but he's certainly learned to live with it so far.

He almost asks how old Kira thinks he is, but then, a precise timeline of someone else's world isn't a reasonable thing to expect someone to know. The look he shoots his roommate is still grim and mutinous as he gives up on trying to preserve his good mood. There's something of it left, though, in looking defiant and sullen instead of just slinking off to silently stare at a wall. The energy that was cheerfulness has become pure orneriness. "Sithspit. I'm not talking about complicated politics. There's a specific chain of events here, and the weak link is me."

With a look like that, it doesn't take extrasensory powers to know Bodhi's stepped behind a wall, pushed to the limits of what he might be able to take in regards to arguing his self-worth. As much as he cares about the man's idea of himself, he doesn't have the energy left to push it.

He's been told most of his life not to, but left to twiddle his thumbs in a closed space, there's little he enjoys more than bashing his head on other people's stubbornness.

Thankfully, good tea is a close second, so he sips it through the length of Bodhi's final words on the subject, and only shoots an assessing look back over the rim of the mug: "Did you just say sithspit?"

Bodhi has to pause a moment to recall that, yes, he did, a moment that kills the momentum of his irritation before it can become anger. "Yes?" It is a little old fashioned and nonsensical, but he's never thought that swearing was supposed to be logical. Honestly, it was barely a curse. Children wouldn't even get much of a raised eyebrow. Bodhi is capable of a pretty foul mouth, but that would be back in his old life, at ease with other pilots and techs. Now there's care taken with everything, even unconsciously.

"No," Kira says, shaking his head, like he can deny Bodhi's bemusement, or the subject, or the universes between their previous lives. "I get the point, and like--Bodhi, please just say fuck if you want to, I don't care. That's just the silliest curse word I've ever heard."

He's not trying to belittle him, moments after failing to build him up, but there's little else he can say in this new world he's been given a peek of, where dogs look like pangolins on roids and people say Sithspit when they're worked up over something.

He can't see why that would be until he remembers that almost no one here knows what he means by the Force, and, as such, would have no context for Sith. In that respect, he can see how it'd seem a bit peculiar. "I think I was going for..." He pauses to mentally sort through what he's seen of the more common cursing options in the canyon. "Bullshit." Fuck isn't much of a swear that he can see, but habit is everything in that respect.

Kira's snort is helpless, trailing off in something closely approaching a giggle. He aims it all into his mug, wondering which layer of their dilemma has him ground down into such a mood. He feels like he's several days out from sleep, despite it being a majority of his days since Tim dragged him in out of the rain. Has he pushed too hard again, or does everything seem to just--matter a bit less, the world shaken and left in its piles, people still rolling out of the fountain, Bodhi coming back with impossible rock samples and tales of hey, look, even more to fail to wrap your head around?

At least there are still the little things, gathering himself behind his mug until he can apologize. "Sorry, yeah, that sounds about right." While they're on the subject of Jyn and alien languages, he finally asks, "do you know what she meant when she said kriff?"

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Slow Rider, Slow Rider, Move On a Little More

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