Rat Race to Hutt Space (Ysmir)

[hugo]

The pair of humans weaved their way through the crowded bazaar, stopping briefly near the far end at a ramshackle kiosk vending long cartons of duty free cigarras.  Mindful of the crowd and the dangers it could be hiding, he selected a carton of Corellian Lights and paid the vendor, a barely-living husk of a geriatric Aqualish.  It never did to go without his sweet, aromatic Lights, and if he could get them without paying the fascist tobacco levies they had in the Core, they were all the sweeter.

They progressed to a less crowded section of the street, past the last of the vendors.  You pick up a lot of things . . . "I'll say," Bas replied.  He wasn't fronting when it came to Jack.  He liked him.  Not too serious but always watching.  That aside, he had proved to be a more than adequate hired gun and transport.  And there was the peculiar aura he couldn't ignore.  It matched the grime which polluted the perceptible Force energies of the planet.  It bothered him a little, to be honest, but Bas supposed it could be worse.  Jack could have an actual odor.  Or spat when he talked.  

"Fair enough."  It was quieter as they neared the midpoint of their journey, Bas estimated, and he listened to the smuggler's story.  "A mando, makes sense.  How'd you like hunting?"  That was actually kind of fascinating.  It reminded him of Laren, his Echani protege, and how the man had taught him all he knew about slinging spice and Echani martial arts.  He wasn't a Jack in that regard, but he was doing alright for himself in the spice-slinging regard.  But Laren's memory-of his life and his death-brought pain.  It was his death and how close Bas himself was to it that had awoken the latent Force connection within him.  Jack had seen what happened to Chabo in the booth.  If he knew anything more than the average layman, he would have recognized the untamed flaring of Force energy as a product of a strong but unrefined source.  

"Not much of a story really.  I was one of the Jedi rejects.  Never had much talent for the Force or whatever, though lately I'm really not so sure . . . "  In truth, Chabo had been involuntary, and it scared him.  This Force thing wasn't something to be fucked with, and the inevitable truth kept coming back to him.  He needed to learn from someone.  This self-taught, homebrewed Jedi shit was obviously dangerous, and he wondered how many more times it would save him rather than kill him. 


"But mom and dad weren't so happy about my uh, lifestyle choices, so they cut me off.  Congrats to them because now their baby boy is slinging red spice in a ravaged warzone with a strange smuggler he met on the Holo."  He said the words as cool as he could, but there was real spite in Bas' words, veiled poorly. 


They walked some more in silence, and Bas stole a couple glances at Jack.  He was a handsome man.  Not really his type, but handsome.  More so, he kept searching for something on the other man's expression, as if he was looking for some visible indication of the Archeri mark he knew was within.  "I can feel it ya know.  Like, I'm not a Jedi or anything, but I can feel it on you."   

[Ysmir]

Never one to rest on his laurels, particularly in a situation like theirs, Jack's head was on a swivel with each step they took into the spaceport bazaar. Every down-on-their-luck sentient they passed seemed hardly a threat on the surface, but you could never know for sure -- the strongest hunters were those who appeared harmless.

When Bas had stopped to purchase some cigarras, Jack went across the walkway and got himself a Corellian sticky bun. They always reminded him of the ones Kailani whipped up at at Bennigan's.

"Hunting had its merits," Jack replied, still hugging the bag of red spice to his side, despite his attempts to look casual. "Not exactly a sustainable profession, dependin' on who you talk to. For Marek, it wasn't something to pay the bills; it was his life. But then, the Mandalorians weren't exactly in a good spot ten years ago. You did what you had to. Me? It was just another notch on the life journey, but I stuck with it for a few years. Taught me ways on how to spot the bad from the good, how to catch lies. Useful things. More important than that, it taught me the difference between a disabling shot, and a kill shot."

And what an important difference it was.

Jack had taken lives -- plenty, in fact. But despite what career soldiers or the occasional assassin would tell you, it never got any easier. If it could be avoided, Jack thoroughly preferred not to kill. Beyond the psychological turmoil that he didn't feel like dealing with, it also carried with it far more attention than he wanted to draw to himself. He and Bas's daring escape from the cantina earlier already had that promenade alight with activity; what they needed now, more than anything, was some peace and quiet. Bas's further explanations earnt a raise of Jack's brow.

Jedi reject?

Jack was scarcely aware such a thing existed. He'd heard stories, of course; that they recruited their members when young, trained them and indoctrinated them in the "Jedi Code" (whatever that meant). But a reject? Looking at the guy, it was hard to believe he had ever been in Jedi training in the first place. But it certainly explained what he had witnessed back at the bar. Why did this stuff always find its way back to me?

When Bas was done, Jack shrugged and looked to him. "I don't think I'm that strange," was all he said in reply, not a hint of judgement in his voice. After all, why would there be? Not like Jack himself had turned out any more respectable. Here, on this ruddy little moon, they were all the same, regardless of where they came from or what pedigree they carried.

They pressed on through the bazaar, and soon were ascending more steps to the upper promenade where the sector's landing pads were. If Chabo's gang had his ship pinged when it arrived, then they might have more than a few uninvited guests waiting for them there. All in due time, however. He just wished he could contact T7 and confirm everything was alright, but the duracrete was still blitzing their comm signals to Hell. As they climbed the steps, Bas's comment seemed to catch Jack off guard. He hesitated and half-stepped, blinking, before continuing to walk alongside Bas in momentary silence. As if to reinforce Bas's observation, a burnt out husk of a Republic starfighter's engine block could be seen laying on the ground just a few meters away from the staircase.

Jack nodded. "I suppose you can," he conceded, "Jedi buddy of mine said that kinda thing happens... wounds in the Force, or something like that."

Jack's voice was laced with indignation and skepticism, as though he himself didn't believe the words he was saying. But he had seen it with his own two eyes, felt it ripping at his mind; the voice of the Chorus chanting, trying to indoctrinate him. It had taken months just to shake himself free of the memories, which is something he'd never had to deal with before. The Force was undeniably real -- too real. The fact he couldn't see it or touch it bothered him all the more.

"It's a feeling you can't really describe, being face to face with those..." he began, though tapered off as he struggled to find the right words. Things? No, they weren't things. They were beings, all of whom used to be sentients like himself and Bas. But they were changed. To this day, it still made little sense to him. "Something tells me this moon will never be the same."

[hugo]

"Strange to them, anyway."  He grinned.  If anything, the smuggler was odd only in how normal he seemed.  With what he'd revealed to Bas about his past, and that sickly aura he shared with the moon under their feet, Jack seemed more or less well-balanced to him.  But what did Bas know about being well-balanced, one might ask the younger human as he lit the third in a chain of acrid cigarras?  Or better yet, why did the still-rapid beating of his heart and the sweet but fading clarity of adrenaline bring him some degree more satisfaction than the double-haul they'd scored?  Why did the weight of killing a man--a brutal, impulsive thing that might could have been avoided had he the wits and patience--blur into the trivial compared to what felt like triumph? 

As for the wound he mentioned, Bas strained to recall his lessons as a youngling.  Whatever he could remember, it definitely fell short of explaining what the Archeri really were, and why their presence hung in the air, and on those they touched.  Bas could only offer a shrug.  "I wish I could tell you more about it, but I'd be lying if I said I remembered anything they taught me on Coruscant, in the classroom at least.  Every now and then I feel like I can snap back into the parts that came more natural to me, you know? Like some kind of fucked mystic muscle memory?" 

By now they'd cleared the better part of their trek through the wrecked city.  Jack's observations about Nar Shadaa helped fill in some of the gaps for Bas.  He'd never been to the moon before, but as they passed through the various levels and platforms, in disparate states of carnage, the younger man grew to appreciate, to some degree, just how devastating the crisis had been to the Smuggler's Moon.  The walkways and skylanes were choked with the traffic he'd expect, but there was something repressed about the place now, as if life were piecing itself back together, but only barely, and in a way that was forever changed.  As they neared the landing pad, he wondered if Jack was like that, altered forever by circumstances beyond his own control.

"I guess we're getting pretty close now.  Stay sharp though, I'd hate to scrape through all that just to get zapped two steps from the cargo ramp."  He checked over his shoulder, eying any fellow passerbys with a discreet, but hard suspicion.  They might have actually pulled this off, and if so, this would be his biggest bag yet.  It took everything he had to keep from grinning.