Desperate Casinowives

[Fromikeable]

Vance almost felt sick to his stomach as he walked to his speeder, the half-eaten egg sandwich in his stomach tumbling thanks to his stress. It growled loudly as the moon bustled around him, his speeder whirring to life with a low hum. As he shifted into gear and got going, he found himself frowning, replaying the morning over and over in his head as he drove.

Had he been too harsh? Had he not been harsh enough? It was all too fresh for him to say, making him huff a curt sigh.

Parking before the Blind Eye, Vance entered just as the casino was opening, the afternoon crowd sparse but slowly thickening. Walking through the front door, he did his best to fake a smile at the desk staff, the security guards scanning bags, and the wait staff and dealers as he passed through the main floor. Only a few games were in session; a few pazaak tables, a few slot machines, and one particularly loud sabacc table. Everyone else seemed to be relaxed, the air of a waning Friday certainly in the air.

But Vance just couldn't relax. As he commanded the elevator upward, he stared through the glass at them all with flattened lips.

Did he want to be alone? No, not at the moment. Surely he would soon, to process through this all, to condense it all down to a size he could digest, but... he needed to talk about it. He needed someone to know that it had happened. Not even that, he just needed someone else to use as a reference, to make sure he knew what sort of calmness he was striving to get back to.

A cursory scan of Lidah's suite revealed no other company. Had she any guests, he would have thought twice, but absent of such, he opened her door without a second thought. The sound of a drama greeted him, the back of Lidah's head visible from her couch. Making his way to her kitchen, he set about clinking glass as he procured two cups, filling both with ice and water. Shrugging off his jacket and tossing it over the back of a chair, he untied his boots and placed them by the door. With that, he delivered both glasses to the couch, setting one down on the coffee table before them as he settled into the couch's other end.

"Any word on when The Fork will open again?" Considering it had only just been shot to hell a few days ago, he already knew the answer, but still. He didn't want to go back to Charlie's Deli ever again, if he could help it.

[Neology]

[googlefont="News Cycle"]

The complete forth season of Ghost Prep School offered mindless background noise as an actress in her twenties with pretty sloe dark eyes simpered in the general direction of an actor in his forties. Of course, their characters were intended to be sixteen or seventeen – Lidah could never remember, exactly. But you couldn’t sell a show with school in the name if the characters ever left, she supposed. Maybe the writers hadn’t expected to get this far. The plot was formulaic in a reassuring sort of way; always just a couple steps from wrapping everything up with a bow, happily ever after. Aggressive, military grade anti-art, it would never make you feel anything in particular. Lidah tapped away on the datapad balanced in her lap, working without the appearance of doing so. Reviewing expenditures over a certain credit amount and affixing her digital thumbprint where it was needed. She glanced up as Vance came in, bumping the volume down several bars. ”Morning.” Technically, it was nearly the middle of the afternoon. The Blind Eye skewed their hours, catering to the night crowds. Of course, Nar Shaddaa was always rather gloomy, with a static-signal toxic sky. ”Well, I was thinking about buying it, actually. What do you think?” The property would be cheap, in its current state. ”Or at least hire some of the staff on for our kitchen. I still want those pancakes.” Lidah murmured a quiet thanks for the glass of ice water, sneaking a covert and lingering glance. ”What’s up?”

[Fromikeable]

Vance did his best to dwell on the question, welcoming the distraction. No matter what, the Fork had to be restored; where else were they going to eat breakfast? But integrating it into the casino itself was a curious idea. Would their clientele go for such a menu? Would they have to tweak it? Would they even want to tweak it? Everything was already pretty good.

Vance hummed in disappointment, his tongue deciding to roll in his mouth rather than answer her questions. The morning’s events were still too fresh to allow his mind to run away with something else.

He hated that feeling.

”I just can’t go to Charlie’s any more.” He paused, trying to shift his focus to the show playing out before them as his mind struggled to come up the right words. The entire experience had been so surreal that he wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t dreamt it, that this wasn’t the first moment of his day and that he’d simply overslept and had a nightmare.

A gentle pinch to his own arm dismissed such fantasies, much to his disappointment.

”My last Jedi master was there.” Looking at Lidah, he did his best to put on an almost joking smile. Given the stress in his shoulders and the small flurry of emotions swimming through his presence, however, the expression came across more apologetic than reassuring. ”She told me about some civil war on a secret planet she’s fighting in, and I… I just left and told her never to speak to me again.”

He huffed a shaky, almost nervous chuckle. He still had no idea what to make of the morning, and part of him worried what Lidah would think. He wouldn’t be happy if she questioned his loyalty, his commitment, or his honesty, but he could live through it. No, he wasn’t worried about that.

However, he wouldn’t be able to handle her disappointment. It would crush him.

”I just- I’m not sure if I should have helped her or punched her in the face or…”

[Neology]

”Oh. Why would …? Oh.” A Jedi lingering within a few blocks of the Eye could be a dangerous thing for all of them. At least Locke seemed to have a real mission this time, something other than a brief layover on his way somewhere else. Scant comfort that was if they’d already identified Vance. Lidah saved her browser tabs and turned her datapad off, setting it aside. The vidscreen stayed on, a much needed offer of mutual, mindless distraction. She spoke openly easily only to one person and that certainly had more to do with Nemsee than it did her. This was different. Nine vast years – accountability and history. ”How did she find you?” Why now? What civil war? How were Jedi from secret planets showing up on Nar Shaddaa? Lidah left these less pressing questions unasked, as careful as probing a puncture wound with the implement still embedded. Another war, though. Wherever it was. Lidah let her head tilt back, the synth leather upholstery cool and pleasant on the back of her neck. She wanted to stay right here, all her bright people and loved ones close by and safe. An impossible ask for so many reasons. ”That sounds fairly certain to me. Not many ways to interpret ‘never speak to me again.’” Her voice was pitched soft, hardly rising above the chatter of the tv, and carefully neutral.

[Fromikeable]

Vance couldn’t detect any anger in her voice, nor was there anything accusatory about her behavior. She turned off her datapad. She left the vid running. She asked some questions. She didn’t ask some others. She used that soft tone of voice, that one that he had first heard after Taris. The one that was her best attempt at concern. Of all the things Vance received from Lidah as time went on, that was the one thing he would never quite get used to.

It never lost its impact on him.

”I don’t know.” Gluing his eyes to the drama unfolding before them, he gave up on trying to focus on the actual story. His vision glazed as the images just became something to look at while he talked. ”She was a Shadow back when she was with the Order. I guess she knows how to stalk someone down.” He hadn’t done nearly as good of a job at hiding his past as Lidah had. Then again, his “death” had mattered far less.

Even still.

”And it was certain.” He cleared his throat, clearly trying to clean up a bit of emotional wavering. As a result, his voice came out a little deeper, and notably more confident. ”Even if I had known that she was alive, I mean… where has she been?” He shook his head at the vid, tapping a finger on his knee.

”The last time I saw her, I was being handed a JediCorps toolbelt. Now she just shows up like she forgot to pick me up from high school and I’ve just been waiting for her on the curb for nine fucking years.”

[Neology]

A shadow. A Sith hunter. An assassin – just by a weaker name. Lidah understood that part. It was a very Jedi thing to do, to soften murder even as they built a career and identity out of it whole cloth. Well. She and Vance had been dead and free, clean of the Sith for seven years. Why now. Why here. This was not a loamy forest floor or a trail of blood in the snow. Nar Shaddaa was a perfect place for a force adept to hide from another, teeming with dense life and a spectrum of emotion that a typical Jedi was not well suited to handle. Digital sleuthing was out of the question. Lidah paid a small fortune to keep it that way and Memento was the best in the business. ”Maybe she just saw you on vid the other day.” She hoped that was it, or that the intel was old. That business at Fork had already run a fine-toothed comb through the internal structures of the Eye and Lidah’s other holdings. Messy, very hard too keep quiet if anything was found. As likely to cause a new problem than fix any of the old. No one liked that sort of scrutiny, not even the innocent. Was. Lidah quirked a brow at that implied flutter of indecision. ”You were out of any Jedi’s reach for a very long time. I wouldn’t necessarily hold the years against your former teacher. The initial mechanism, by all means.” She picked up her glass of ice water and took a long drink, trying to compose her thoughts. A light touch only – sometimes it made Vance uncomfortable when she reminded him of his own freedom. ”You aren’t a padawan or an apprentice anymore. It’s your decision. “I hope she can respect that.”

[Fromikeable]

It’s your decision. Force knew that had always been a hard pill for him to swallow. It was a remarkable truth; from the minute he’d woken up in Lidah’s kolto tank to the minute he’d walked out of that deli today, no one had held his hands to any flame. Novus had never demanded that he stay. Lidah had never demanded that he help her. In much the same vein, Tal hadn’t demanded that he do anything for her.

Him telling her not to speak to him had been his choice, and his choice alone.

”I know.” Covering half his face with a hand, he nodded slightly, acknowledging his own agency. It had seemed silly at first, but he found that taking a minute to breathe, to take count of what exactly he’d had control over, helped kill any panic before it began. He couldn’t feel cornered and lose his mind if he took count of how many walls were around him.

”I’m just not so sure she will.” Rubbing his forehead, his hand dropped from his face, revealing a somewhat exhausted expression. ”I thought my life as it concerned Talau Firians was over. Yet here she was today, staring at me from across the room while I bit into my sandwich.”

On the vid before them, a fight broke out between two women, the both of them exchanging insults and jabs. As a crowd formed to try and pull them apart, Vance couldn’t help but knit his brow.

”I don’t want her in my life, and I would rather not have to communicate that idea with anything worse than the yelling I did today.” His eyes flicked down at his saber. For all her faults, Tal had been the one to help him find the very sage green crystal that still sat within the artisanal hilt today, the stone that had changed and ebbed and turned with every turn of Vance’s life. It was arguably his footprint in the Force; hundreds of years from now, when he was bones and ash, that crystal would still feel exactly like he did. It wasn’t the same crystal he’d found in that cave, nor was it the same crystal that had been repairing air ducts on Taris. The last decade had changed in ways Vance was both proud and horrified of.

He just hoped it wouldn’t have to change to reflect magistricide as well.

[Neology]

”Understandable.” Lidah agreed mildly, making private note of that name. ‘Talau Firians’ was no Jedi she’d ever met personally, that much could be said for certain … Assuming Jedi was even the right word, anymore. Vance made this absence sound very long, continuous. Unusual, that. The Jedi Order didn’t change much over time, if at all. Not over hundreds of years. Following that, it seemed safe to assume that they still frowned on members haring off on personal projects. Even if her own inside information, in form of Vance Asano himself, was nearly a decade out of date. Locke might know more, I suppose. And he’d certainly warn her if some secret war somewhere in the galaxy was about to boil over into the real thing, right? … Probably. Otherwise, Jedi and Republic business was quite verboten, in or outside the bedroom. She knew better than to ask. ”Do you have any reason to believe she’d take this further?” Lidah angled her head to watch Vance rather than the vidscreen, brow creasing in uncharacteristically unguarded concern. It was not necessarily her place to protect Vance any longer, if it had ever truly been, Sith being what they were. And really, protecting her and her investments made up most of his job description these days. But there were some traumas Lidah would still like to spare him. A physical confrontation with a former teacher, such as the one he seemed to be suggesting, could certainly top that list. ”Okay. I have a plan. I’ll have our network find her and we’ll see if she can be reasoned with. If not, or if she wont meet with me … I’ll have to think of something else. Non-violent, I promise. If it can be at all helped.” In translation: not unless this Jedi-person tries to hurt us first.

[Fromikeable]

Vance let Lidah's question linger in the air, his uncertainty clear in the silence. Would Tal let him be? The woman had been a die-hard Shadow for years before he'd even met her, and her disappearance had hinged upon an assignment to hunt some Dark Jedi somewhere. What was to keep her from regarding him just as he was; a former Sith working for a crime lord in Hutt space? She'd already found him once, so whether or not Vance believed her reasoning for doing so was moot.

Whether or not he found himself being jumped by a former Jedi depended entirely on her whims.

Vance bit back another sigh, rubbing his eyes. Could he survive a fight like that? Assuming he could see it coming, he'd have a fighting chance, he supposed. If he'd learned anything, it was how to put up a strong defense, how to endure hard hits, and how to deal with the unexpected. But who was to say she'd do it alone? He knew about Rilia, after all, a planet that was supposed to be secret to just about everyone. Did his unwillingness make him a target now? A loose end?

As Lidah's plan rung in his ears, his eyes opened, his head turning to look at her. His initial reaction was to raise a finger in protest, unhappy at the idea of her spending any time dealing with this. She had the entire Exchange to run; he didn't want her to take time out of her day to deal with his personal problem, especially given that it was rooted in history she hadn't even been around for.

On the other hand, his heart swelled as he digested her thoughts. Non-violent? She promised?

Without thinking, he shuffled across the couch and wrapped his arms around her, a mammoth smile etching over his face as he sighed heavily in relief over her shoulder. He almost felt greedy accepting her help, but it was so incredibly welcome that he didn't even care.

"Thank you." Letting her go, he huffed a slight chuckle, visibly relaxing. "Sorry, I know you hate those." She'd never been big on hugs.