Bitter Sweet

[Avalore Eden]

More bitter than sweet, now, but we aren't there yet.

Not yet.

Commenor
Chasin City

She'd left the Chasin City Hospital an hour ago to stretch her legs, get some fresh air, lose her Jedi robes for a while. Think.

Thinking had become a very difficult task as of late, what with all the horrors on her mind. Hal had been missing for a month now, and only two weeks ago she'd received a parcel in the mail containing the man's eyes. Needless to say, the visual of those bright blues floating listlessly in their jar was not something Avalore had been able to wipe from her memory.

How do you forget something like that? How do you stop worrying? How to you sleep at night knowing your best friend had been, potentially still was being tortured? How do you pretend like everything's alright?

You can't. You don't.

The Jedi Order's Chief Healer was wilting under the duress and slowly spinning deeper into depression. Her only peace was her work, and her only rest was medicated. Despite the reassuring words from other that they were doing everything within their power to find Hal, until the day she had the man back in her arms there likely would be no sleep.

No sleep.

Avalore tugged at her jacket, pulling it snug over her shoulders as she stepped into a chill breeze that day. Overcast sky, bleak horizon - she'd walked straight into every opening scene of a thriller-film and not even realized it. At least she'd acknowledged the strange shadow that had been tailing her every move for the last several days, but at this point the woman was chalking it up to sleepless hallucinations. Paranoia.

The potentiality of death often make one introspective. Made them think of strange things, dig up old memories, and Avalore Eden had a lot of old memories she'd stuffed away years ago to dig up. For whatever reason it made her painfully aware of the total lack of closure in her life.

So many people gone and she'd only ever gotten to say goodbye to one of them. Did funerals count as goodbye? Made her uneasy thinking about it.

There's that shadow again...

Fething creepy.

Now where was that cafe?

[member="Trenchcoat Man"]

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

Commenor
Chasin City

Avalore

She was his twin. In her death, it was like phantom limb syndrome for a whole other body. When her soul was ground into dust under the Wheel?

Well.

Avalore. Avalore. Avalore.

It hadn’t been a mantra for him in a long time. Hadn’t been an actual name for even longer. Her memory in his head was more a thing of self-flagellation, a finger in the wound so he could never forget his wickedness. It wouldn’t heal. It made him deranged.

And then, he backslid into addiction, his junkie mind warped it into an excuse. The memory became a reason why he shouldn’t even try to be a decent person.

But he was clean now. He was trying to get cleaner.

And maybe, just maybe, her name could be a Hope.

She was the only other carrier of his sick bloodline, and she seemed to be doing okay…In general. Not today. Not lately. Still, he watched over her, he wanted to see her survive.

As terrible and crooked as their family tree had been, he loved them all. He didn’t want to see the whole thing come down, succumbing to madness – Just one more dead-end mutation on the road to the end.

But, the Secret Chiefs of the Universe had revealed to him that the galaxy was on its way out…So maybe they won after all? As much as anyone can?

He just wanted to see them all survive.

Typically, he held her too sacrosanct to spoil with his cigarette smoke, but, since his rebirth in the womb/egg of Coruscant, his vice of Schaedenfreude had been replaced by his virtue of Compassion.

Sentient life was not isolated and dying alone. They were tethered and alive together.

Like a sudden breeze, Benedict had moved behind Avalore, setting a comforting (in intention) and oddly confident hand on her shoulder, reining her steps in to be guided by his. Chasin was a foodie city, and while Benedict was no connoisseur, the city whispered to him its secrets. In the contents of drug stores, he knew what places were becoming trendy. In the cracks of sidewalks, Chasin told him where the experts grazed. It all buzzed from everywhere – in conversations, in radiowaves, on holovision screens.

Their shared surname concerned a paradise unseen, then lost forever.

“Anyfing you want to eat, luv. Whatever it is. Just say the name.”

They were beautiful. They were doomed.

[member="Avalore Eden"]​

 

[Avalore Eden]

Those first few steps turned into stumbles.

Avalore wasn't the sort that had some omnipresence bout her. She didn't sense things coming like the normal Jedi could. The Force wasn't a web of hers to weave, but more for her to become entangled in. Instincts - likely dull ones at that, and intuition were what the Healer typically employed. They weren't exactly the strongest ones either, but she was still alive today where so many others were not.

Normal had to count for something, right?

A startled breath and wide brown eyes turned to greet [member="Trenchcoat Man"], and it likely took a few seconds longer than might've been right for her to recognize the face there. His wasn't one she would likely ever forget, but her mind had been churning through memories of faces long since gone ... and one face currently missing. Took some time for them to dissipate from her inner eye in order to let the outer eyes really capture the one beside her.

"Benny-" expelled breathlessly, accompanied by the shock of the curse laid upon his name. She'd forgotten about that. Cringe.

"...sorry, I...wasn't expecting..." you? Naturally. But she hadn't been expecting anyone, really. She came to Commenor to be alone, ironically.

"What are you doing here? ...when did you even get here?"

He was leading now, his long-legs taking them with the confidence of a station conductor. All aboard the crazy train, platform 13 5/7ths, choo choo.

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

Benny​

There was a moment where it was as if reality cracked, something from outside making revisions, edits – replacing unwanted content with that of preference. Her mouth moved to say the word, to say his name, but the sound never came out, and while her face was predominantly one of confusion with a sprig of relief, it only served to make the actual experience that much more jarring by contrast. The sound dropped off, hesitated, like the audio were a half-second out of synch with what played on-screen, before returning, spiking to the insufferable volumes, replaced with some sort of abomination of varying fonts, like a ransom note constructed from magazine clippings after his name itself had been haphazardly sheered from the world with safety scissors. A woman's voice, screaming his condemnation for all within earshot, shrieking through the Force -- the brand upon his name:


COWArd BAstARD

HE’S A LiAr​

DON’T TRUST HIM, DON’T TRUST HIM. DON'T TRUST HIM. DON'T TRUST HIM.

TRaYa.

MUrdEReR​

And that, perhaps, is what made it so terrifying. The fact he knew this curse was not one of otherworldly evil or even goodness – nothing grandiose from outside the whole of space-time. No, it cost only a life, cast by a Nightsister spin-off he had once loved, who he had watched be strangled death in front of her own coven. Helpless. Fragile. Human. Whatever lurked out there beyond the stars, outside the realms of their comprehension, would be truly nasty indeed.

He did not fault her for trying to say his name. And though it hurt a bit, he merely smiled, bittersweet, pleased enough to know that there were people who still remembered who he used to be.

Who he was supposed to be.

“I’m always here, petal.”

It was a bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn’t entirely untrue. He routinely walked about the bulk of the cityscapes in the known galaxy, baring witness to the development and degradation of culture. They didn’t sleep, so he didn’t really, either.

She hadn’t really answered his request, so he’d reckoned comfort food might be the solution. Unfortunately, she was from Corellia, a planet that had long fallen to the plague of Information Cities and the inevitable monoculture they would blandize into. Besides, the Corellian pubs had a habit of putting up “Never Forget” and other shameful exploitations of tragedy to rake in business from humans who liked to believe there existed a “human” cultural identity somewhere beyond Human Privelege; he reckoned a Corellian restaurant, if there were such a thing, would only do the same.

So, he would pick. He knew a ballin’ Ithorian Raw Vegan place two megablocks west.

“Bloody Republican cities, “he muttered, filling the space with a partial accounting of his estrangement from her life. “Always come on the old ‘How’s the job hunt going? Think you’ll have your own place soon?’ and that.”

Benedict inflected a meek, unconfident voice of a friend to passive to tell you you couldn’t stay on his couch anymore.

“’Y’know… If you didn’t drink so much, I bet you could really start paying off those debts…’”

[member="Avalore Eden"]​

 

[Avalore Eden]

Avalore frowned, though not in a negative manner. As much of a revolting sort of man he might be to many others, Benedict Eden was, aside from her own child, the only living family she had left. No matter the consequence, no matter the truth of what things he'd seen, done, or done nothing to stop, she'd always be glad to see him.

He was her little reminder that somebody out there either had a sense of humanity, however small, or a really terrible sense of humor.

Let's kill everyone she loves ... except this hag, leave him. HaHA.

"Spooks," she said in some vague form of apology for bringing the reminder of his curse upon him. His nickname. One of many he'd tallied up in their strange adventures.

I remember the first time I met him, back on Coruscant after that Sith Witch burned fire into my mind. He'd commandeered a lift in the Jedi Temple. I was in my Master's arms, too terrified to walk on my own, and suddenly we weren't in Coruscant anymore.

That's how she felt about every meeting with the man since then. I'm not in Coruscant anymore.

His realm, whatever wayside it was, was not something normal people were privy to, that much she knew. It was likely her own awareness of it was marked as some kind of anomoly, not that she would ever comprehend the mysterious means in which he used to travel from invisible city to invisible city. Much like the powers of the Force she'd never been able to grasp, Avalore Eden would make do with accepting them for what they were.

Avalore watched him as they walked, quite incapable of taking her eyes off him. The walking shipcrash, the I-shouldn't-be-staring-but-I-can't-look-away man.

"You look different," she said finally, stumbling on a patch of broken duracrete walkway, "did something happen to you?"

[member="Trenchcoat Man"]

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

“Spooks,” she’d said; a playful nickname he wasn’t sure he’d earned. Did he deserve this familiarity? Had she known him enough to be so casual, so free of trepidation?

He wondered how she saw him. What ghost narrative she had created in his time away, and how it linked with the body of trouble he had grown, killed, and grown again for himself.

As sentient life mapped their patterns, was it possible he had left signals in all his noise that connected in the image of a Saint or a Martyr? Something other than addict, a liar, a knife in the back? An infinite number of worlds – Could there have been one where he had never fallen, where he was still the Sentinel his busted, unstable lightsaber asserted he was in its every yellow ignition? Was it she kept it, this cosmic rarity, this otherwise impossibility?

Or was he just mad?

He felt the relentless drag of a dead muse, scraping along the murky bottom of exposition, of reason, of behavioral accounting. He desired to say more, to shout it to the world. But maybe, just maybe, his greatest strength was always in putting down the whole thing down from the confines of his own head…in the conversations between him and…whoever.

Have you guessed who it is yet?

What could he offer now, from this new perspective of open hearts and white teeth? Rejuvenated skin, Aveeno daily face wash to prevent aging and Sith Corruption?

“Be mindful when exorcising your demons, treasure, that you don’t evict the best fing about you,” he stated, his face pointed in mischief, deliberately obscure. He took her hand, and without looking both ways, guided them across the street, several near misses with passing speeders that never honked…just glided by.

[member="Avalore Eden"]​

 

[Avalore Eden]

The moment of confusion was very real, and at the touch of his hand in her own somehow became tangible. What does one do with confusion in the hand? Obscurity and mystery, palm at palm, the strength of someone's grasp who'd known and seen far more than she. Who walked fearless into the shadows of the galaxy-

"What...hey! What are you-" they were stepping into traffic. Busy traffic. Avalore felt her heavy heart leap within her chest as she stumbled after him, wide eyes shying at the speeders skidding past her heels, grabbing at jacket tail. When they'd crossed she was lashed at his arm, breathing like she'd run with the bulls.

Her heart beat a staccato so intense she could feel it in her temples.

"Are you crazy?" breathless, the Healer looked back over her shoulder, his hand still firmly latched within her own. She didn't notice the strangeness of the trek through traffic, how they'd never swerved, never blared a horn, how they'd seemed to pass through as if memory or a ghost. All she knew was that they could have been killed. What was he thinking?

Her free hand lifted to her forehead in disbelief.

I'm dreaming, I must be dreaming...

[member="Trenchcoat Man"]