sololoquy | open post

Stop treating this like it's fun. [ She snarls it, latching onto that rather than her genuine fear and discomfort. Good to latch onto the anger instead. It kept the Dark Side close. ] We aren't here for fun. You are helping me fulfill a mission. You will not hide things from me, and you will not work around me.

[ She snaps that last part out tightly. ]

If you need me to prime the compressor, you can ask. [ She reaches over to do just that now that he's not all up in her business. ]

[He blinks again, and then slowly lifts his hands in surrender.]

Alright, alright. Stars, you're grumpy. If you don't want to be here, there's a perfectly servicable cot in the back. Or a bench, if that's more your speed.

[Ben does his best not to show all of his exasperation through that exchange. But with the compressor primed, it only takes him a moment to send them into hyperspace with the push of a lever, space blurring and turning blue around them.]

I want answers, Solo.

[ She doesn't let it go, accusations of grumpiness be karked. The insolence in waving her off only rankles her further, in fact, for how opposite it is her prior experiences. Her tempers are not to be dismissed and put into naptime. They're to be obeyed. ]

Tell me where we're going.

[ It's a point of pride now. He'd batted his eyelashes, and she'd gone along with it. She was weak. And stupid. ]

The Umbara system.

[That comes out somewhat exasperated. He was under no illusions that she tristed him, but he can’t really help being put out by her demands. He turns the pilot’s chair around and moves to retreat to the ship’s hull.]

It’s a few hours in hyperspace. Happy?

[ No.

Far from it, in fact. And it wasn't just the threat of going to the Shadow World that chilled her blood. She had never been easily scared, even less by ghost stories and the like. Kira was a ghost story. But the way he leaves, the discontent that rolls off of him as he does. It leaves her feeling discontent. Worse, really, than when she'd been trying to juggle his closeness.

She can't stomach his closeness, but she can't tolerate him walking away. Where did that leave her? She stayed rooted to her seat in the cockpit despite the dismissal. Hours, he'd said. It was too long to be in anyone's company.

It's close to a half hour later that she finally gets up to join him. Works up the nerve, really. She has nothing to offer him. No small talk. But she seeks his company like a lost lothcat anyway, avoiding drawing too close to him, but wanting to linger in the same space. ]

[Ben is holed up in the sleeping quarters, spread on a cot that just barely fits him with his legs crossed, a book in one hand, and his arm behind his head. Its spine is well worn (too worn to make out a title), suggesting that he's either borrowed it from someone, or he's had it for far too long.

When Kira appears in the doorway, he glances her way with a raised eyebrow, turning the book face down on his chest and then resting his arm over it.

By now, he's keyed into the fact that she seems to be made uncomfortable by any displays of affection, even those not so entirely genuine.]

I knew you'd miss me eventually.

[He might have a death wish.]

[ She doesn't reply, too uneasy with the truth and too incapable of the lie. There is no valid reason to be seeking out company at all, least of all his, but here she is. She surveys where he stretches out on the bunk, hovering awkwardly in the doorway.

He's reading. A solitary activity. She prefers the same, but reading was never on the agenda for her. She's never been good at it, and Snoke always discouraged it. Why read when she could just hear it firsthand from him? His knowledge was unquestionable.

She invites herself into the space but settles on the floor by the opposite wall, knees bent in front of her. ]

Continue.

[ She delivers it like an order because she doesn't know how else to put it. She hadn't come to interrupt him. ]

[Man, teasing her is less fun when he feels like he's kicking a confused dog. She sits down and his smirk flickers and dies -- she wants him to keep reading while she's just...sitting there? No way, now its awkward.]

You don't--have to just sit there.

[He turns over to lay on his side so that he can look at her, pinning the book to the bed instead of to his chest. It is clear that her behavior has made him uncomfortable as well.]

I'm making you uncomfortable.

[ She observes it like she might notice that it's raining or that the spinebarrels are blooming or any other number of pedestrian things, none of which are evocative in the slightest. ]

I'm not in your way. Get over it.

[ Serves him right. It's petty and spiteful and she isn't sorry for it at all. ]

That's rich, coming from you.

[He makes a face, lips pursed as he makes a show of opening the book up again to read. Which begs the question as to why he has physical media instead of a holo of some sort.

But as Ben quickly learns -- he's spent more years than he cares to admit being alone on the Falcon. Reading with someone in the room is...extremely distracting.

So eventually, he sighs and gives up, shutting the book and shoving it away.]

What is with you and staring at people though, seriously? What do you do when nobody's around?

Find new ways to kill people.

[ It's a joke.

It's probably the first joke she's ever told though, to her credit, so maybe he should cut her some slack. But it's also not far off the truth, which makes it awfully hard to tell, especially when her face doesn't change. ]

[Ben goes quiet, opening his mouth, and then closing it as he tries to figure out if she's joking or not. But he quickly decides it is probably better to assume that she is, and he starts an awkward, exaggerated laugh.]

Look at you -- never would have taken you for a jokester.

[Please be joking.]

[ There's a flicker of something light behind her eyes. Surprise, maybe. Or pride. Whatever it is, it's satisfied with his laughter, even awkward and exaggerated as it is. It's not like she knows the difference. The smile doesn't hit her mouth fully, but the corners turn up just slightly as she lets her gaze skate away from him. It's too obvious that she's avoiding looking at him, really. There's nothing else remotely interesting in this room. ]

I train. [ So, no. Not entirely a joke. And truthfully, the staring at people thing probably comes from (1) the fact that she's rarely in social situations at all, (2) the fact that he's the oddest, most fascinating person she's ever met. She stares at him far more often than anyone else. In fact, she prefers to avoid looking at most people. ] I didn't come here to talk. I prefer you when you aren't speaking.

Yeah well --

[She didn't really need to say as much. In fact, his feelings might be a little hurt -- or they would have been, if Kira hadn't taken him hostage once before. Still, wanting him to only be silent is a little too real.]

-- I don't exactly keep a lot of company 'round here, so.

[Excuse him for calling her out on the staring. His sleeping quarters are evidence enough that he doesn't entertain often. Or ever. There are a few empty ration packets scattered around, clothes shoved in every corner imaginable, a few blaster parts scattered on his nightstand.

He forces himself to turn away from her, in hopes that he'll stop thinking about her staring at him.]

Don't stare. It's rude. And you'll give people the wrong idea.

What idea is that?

[ She sounds genuinely curious. Moreso, now that he points out that he doesn't keep a lot of company. She chooses to overlook the 'around here' part of his admission. For all her talk of wanting him to be silent, for once, she seems conversational. It's almost normal, if not for the fact that she has the social skills of a genetically modified chimera built in a terrible genetic experiment by a pair of psychopaths perpetuating their childhood abuses. But other than that. ]

[He is so not equipped for this conversation.]

The idea that you want someone else's attention on you.

[That's a little less blatant than the actual answer he probably should have given. But its not his job to teach Snoke's killing machine the ins and outs of social grace. He isn't particularly good at it himself.

And now this is somehow more awkward.]

Which you obviously don't actually want.

[ She weighs that opinion for a minute but ultimately doesn't confirm or deny. Whether or not she wants his attention on her is seemingly irrelevant to the situation, after all. If he has something he wants to be doing, he'd do it regardless of what she wants. Kira does not imagine her wants rank anywhere of significance — for him, or anywhere else, so long as there is no violence behind the communication of those wants. ]

Read it out loud.

[ That seems to solve all of it. ]

And I'll stop staring.

[ Then she doesn't have to go through the difficulty of conversing with him, he will be spared her staring, and she will still sate this gnawing feeling in her chest that demands his company. A win all around. Go go gadget problem solving skills. ]

You said you--

[No, you know what? He isn't going to complain about Kira no longer telling him to shut up. Or, he wouldn't, if not for her suggestion. If possible, he looks even more uncomfortable -- and he has to clear his throat before he can reply.]

Actually, I think I prefer the staring.

[ An unexpected response. Kira's eyes flash wide, briefly, and she staggers on that response. It's more abrupt than she had thought it would be, despite a reasonable compromise. She's clearly stepped in something, but she can't imagine what.

Maybe it's private.

Maybe it's personal.

She probes at his feelings, but it's just discomfort. Congrats. Now he gets more intense staring. He unlocked that secret reward. ]

Why?

Because.

[He's a little defensive when he says it, closing the book and shoving it under the pillow of his cot like it never existed. This is how he dies. With Snoke's assassin coaxing him to read Stardust to her.

He needs to say something more.]

What happened to not wanting to hear me talk?

[ She is put in an uncomfortable position by that. At this point, it feels like they're just playing hot potato with that visceral discomfort. She grapples with it a moment. It's hard to respond to him without being like 'I hate your entire personality but your voice sounds nice.' That, also, is not entirely true. She only hates the way he makes her feel mocked and human at the same time. ]

In the interest of killing time, I've made an exception. [ Then she gets an idea and goes for the logical appeal. This would be easier if she were good with people, and used to relying on anything but blunt honesty and brute force. ] You told me my time in your presence would not be wasted. Unless you have another suggestion?

Alright, fine. Fine. Fine.

[If she's going to be that way, then he's going to make it his business that she regrets it. So, Ben sits himself up and reaches under his pillow to grab the book, folding the corner of one page so he doesn't lose his spot later.

Then he goes back to the beginning and. Struggles for a moment to get started. But then he goes on.

As it turns out, Ben has inherited his mother's dramatic flair. He starts off in a rather droll narrator voice, but when it comes to voices, he assigns a different one to each character. It is a slow start, spending much of the time building up the lead male character to be charismatic and do-no-wrong.

If she doesn't stop him before the leading female (and love interest) is introduced and summarily put in harm's way for the male's heroic rescue, he will pause shortly after.]

--this is. Kind of long. Are you sure you want me to read the whole thing?

[ To her credit, Kira follows through on her promise. She does stop staring at him, instead picking some of the blaster parts off his nightstand and diverting her attention to fidgeting with them, piecing components together and inspecting them while he reads. It keeps her hands occupied with something mindless while she focuses on the story.

He has a calming voice when he's not being obnoxious, rumbling and consistently dipping in and out of different characters, and it's a good story. She hadn't expected fiction, somehow, but this is an adventure story. The hero is charming and brave and he swoops in to rescue that woman. It's all very silly, frankly. The world Kira knows does not work this way. There are no heroes who swoop in and save anyone. There is only the cold reality that if you want to survive, you cultivate power, and those who have power seek to use it.

The absurdity of it, so removed from reality, does not stop her from looking up with wide, frantic eyes when he interrupts himself. The panic doesn't strike the rest of her face, but by the look in her eyes, you'd think he had threatened to depressurize the cabin. ]

Don't stop.

[ It comes out tight like an order. Her hand grips the blaster component a little tighter. But of course he's bored. He's read it all before. By the look of it, she suspects multiple times, but she tries to barter anyway— ]

Skip ahead to where you were.

[ Then he can go back to reading, and she can just be a voyeur to it. ]

Edited (what if i remembered to call her kira more often than 30% of the time) 2018-10-01 15:11 (UTC)

[He notices it, and fights the smile it threatens to bring -- really, it'd be a sad sort of smile anyway. She's hooked on his every word, but that makes sense of course. If she was raised by Snoke, he can't imagine she's ever been read to. Had she ever read fiction to start with? Aside from all the First Order propaganda, that is.

He considers her demand for a moment, dropping his gaze while all his sympathetic thoughts climb over each other. When he had agreed to take her on board, he hadn't expected this sort of behavior. He expected the hovering, the ordering about, and had been prepared for that with his own rebuttals. He has no rebuttal for this, only the reminder that she is a fascist killing machine...in theory.

But what kind of fascist killing machine wanted teen romance novels read to them?

Ben decides before long that he can't think about it too deeply. He only has room to care about one organization, and that organization certainly wasn't going to be the First Order.]

Okay.

[He flips the book back to its dog-earred page and picks back up from where he'd left off, trying to remember the voice acting he'd already committed to. They are deep in the plot now, with the hero going through some self-discovery plot and discovering the Force within him, and how it connects him to the rest of the galaxy.

The focus switches from introduction to the hero being chased down, and then to being threatened. The love interest taken hostage, being forced to choose between autonomy and her life. Somewhere from before he'd read to Kira, a Wookiee companion had been introduced, and his life is to be traded for the love interest. He doesn't translate the Shyriiwook -- there's too much drama to bother.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Kira mess with the blaster parts.]

[ The components don't actually fit together. Kira realizes this rather quickly, noting before he gets through another chapter that there's not actually a complete blaster here. She gives up around then, setting them back on the nightstand where she'd found them, arranging them so that he can easily tell everything's there.

Afterwards she just tips her head back against the wall, shutting her eyes lest he think she's staring. She's so impassive as to look like she may have fallen asleep, but every once in a while she furrows her brow as though trying to parse some part of the story made difficult by hearing it rather than reading it, or some piece that she has to pick up on quickly now that she has skipped a considerable chunk and things need to be slotted into place.

It's an oddly peaceful moment. She loses herself in it, forgets the distracting ambient thoughts of maybe she ought to stare at him because she does want to give him the idea that she wants something from him.

Choosing to stop him feels impossible, but she knows eventually, that's what it needs to come down to. They will arrive. There is a task at hand still. And it simmers low in the back of her mind until she cannot physically ignore it anymore. She opens her eyes as he finishes a chapter. ]

Why is the Resistance in the Umbara System?

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