Death and Women | Deja Bloom

[Tyger Tyger]

It had happened in Quantill City on Ando, but Milo had come to find that, really, it could have been anywhere.

One Milo Nox, TIE Pilot, attached to a bombing raid on behalf of the Sith Empire. They were to free Ando from the Republic. They were to ingratiate to the ethnic group of their political preference. With the heavy-influence of the Sith at the time, they would have likely developed a Sith government and turned the people into caricatures of themselves, after deracinating them from their culture, from each other.

But all that wasn’t Milo’s concern. He was to “liberate” the Aqualish from their “progressive” Republic overlords and their particular brand of monoculture. He didn’t really buy into all the propaganda reveling in his prospective heroism, no, but, the loyalty, the fidelity, the honor. The code, the duty. Why not? He had paid for it. There was too much sunken debt to give up on the Empire now.

His bomber was shot down at the edge of the atoll, his bringing it down along the beachhead probably the only thing that kept his engines from exploding on impact. Salt water licking razor blades into fresh, open wounds, he lay behind the cover and concealment offered by his wreckage, G.I. blaster pistol in hand, clutched desperately as though it were a religious artifact.

The Republic Ground Forces were coming for him. Issuing terms of surrender by artillery-based loudspeakers, messages betrayed instantly by blaster fire streaming overhead, melting into the TIE frame.

From behind his cover, Milo poked his head out. To find some measure of how screwed he really was. Oh, and he was. But what sank in were the Aqualish sitting on their apartment balconies, watching the whole thing unfold like it were a holovision program. Their eyes, black and listless.

He specifically remembers a woman, stepping out to the edge and shaking hair fibers and dust from her vinyl carpet. As though the dust even mattered. As though there wasn’t a war going on just outside her peripheral vision.

He remembered how his blood boiled in his veins, how suddenly he remembered and bought into every ounce of propaganda. His outrage that the Empire was wasting its resources saving such ingrates, these subhumans. He called them every slur he knew, about spiders and monkeys and fish. He even made some up. How could their basic humanity not compel them to action?

Easy. They weren’t human at all. Of course. That must be it.

It wasn’t until he had become Tyger Tyger that he understood; forgave them, in the only way that he could.

While this was unique to him, they saw it every day. His horror was their lives. His plight wasn’t even entertaining anymore.

He found it curious that such blind hatred could only be borne of this innocence. The entitlements of a life lived in security.

Not 15 minutes later, his flight group would return for him with a second bomber run and rip the infrastructure in half.

[member="Deja Bloom"]

 

[Déja Bloom]

He was five feet away and a million miles. Expression slack with memory. He looked tranquil, staring through the floor between Deja’s chair and its side table companion… but there was a hurricane behind his eyes, “Tyger Tyger."

She spoke his name as a tender command, using her diaphragm and keeping her throat clear. The enlisted men and women she had worked with on Naboo responded well to a measure of authority. Their conditioning was the cradle to which they returned when the backdrop of their waking world dissolved to reveal a breathing canvas of red hell. She moved to say his name again, but thought better of it.

Let it process.

Without craning her neck, her eyes floated to the datapad that rested on the arm of her chair. She searched the counseling referral Tyger had arrived with, made official by the stoic seal of Grand Moff Fortan, for another name he might go by. Perhaps even a rank. There was nothing, though. Curious. Her eyes returned to the man seated across from her. This time, she noticed the blaster at his hip.

Private security? Port patrol? Deja drank in all the data. Just a well-armed private citizen? She wondered just before dismissing the notion. A civilian who reported to a Grand Moff wasn’t a likely answer. A bounty hunter?

She felt her consciousness swell. It strained at the thought like a needle grasping at true north. Deja’s hadn’t been in Avalonia long but she had seen enough First Order officers to generate a reliable profile for one. Crisp, polished and clean. Around every corner, another duplicate. This man, Tyger, was cut from a different cloth.

He stirred, shaking off the shackles of his spell. Deja, patient and open, gently pressed her next question, “What brings you here today?”

[member="Tyger Tyger"]

 

[Tyger Tyger]

He wasn’t haunted. Nobody needs to recall their entire life in order to become the way they are now. It was a truth consumed and digested. He was a man forged and then sharpened.

Still, though…It gave him pause when he reflected on how far he had come, the simple math from there to now.

Milo’s eyes moved from the floor, to her desk, to the piano beyond it – his irises shifting from fixture to fixture not in a casual roll, but more akin to a camera taking pictures…Focusing, flashing, shifting targets. A sniper.

Finally, they rested on her. He said nothing, assessing her with that unshaken stare common in Soldiers that made lesser people wilt under the scrutiny. Until, suddenly, his vision shifted left…wavering, for some unknown reason.

“I know this…,” he began his lie, blatantly obvious in its cliché’. He abandoned it, mid-thought, mid-sentence. “I need therapy.” Such a grotesquely bad liar.
Milo leaned forward suddenly, apparently anxious. Words spewed from his mouth in stark contrast to the interviews and background checks they each had to sustain before.

“Just...If a person didn’t talk, you wouldn’t assume they couldn’t read, right? Would you make that assumption?”

[member="Deja Bloom"]

 

[Déja Bloom]

Sometimes clients were simple. Every now and then one would arrive in a straightforward gloom. They might say something that synced up seamlessly with their expression, I’m sad or It hurts, and Deja could climb into their melancholy and walk beside them. Sometimes her job was easy.

Not this time.

This man was second guessing. Offering and taking back. Deja’s hands folded in her lap palms open as if trying to catch it all. Being present wasn't easy for him, that much was clear. Something about her or the room or the mere prospect of therapy didn’t make him feel safe. Sympathy swathed her heart… and it may have been evident on her face.

“Alright.” She said, concise but not uncaring. Deja wanted to commend him for the courage of just being there. Men and women forged by fighting, however, typically didn’t respond well to receiving praise for something as outwardly minimal as showing up.

“If I met a person who couldn’t talk, would I assume they couldn’t read?” She repeated his question, slow enough to communicate that she had heard what he said. Maybe pick up the pace a bit. Deja silently assessed herself. He isn’t developmentally delayed, he’s just out of his element.

“No…” She softly shook her head, “If I met someone who didn’t speak, I would wonder if they had been injured.” Deja pressed her hand to her throat. As she imagined it, her brow drew together as her eyes fell, “But, in my experience, most people who couldn't speak suffered from what doctors call Selective Mutism.”

Deja looked up again, back to him. Both hands returned to her lap, “It’s an anxiety disorder.” She explained, “And a rather common one... if you can believe it.”

Her head inclined and she surveyed him. Not long enough to make him uncomfortable, at least she hoped, but long enough to get a feel for whether or not he was following. More importantly, Deja needed to judge if he was ready to allow her to follow him…

“Can you tell me why this topic is important to you?”


[member="Tyger Tyger"]

 

[Tyger Tyger]

There was a palpable increase in tension as she repeated his question; the man’s Presence score always betraying his stoic expressions through his general atmosphere. It was a flare-up of impatience; a momentary irritation as the reflected question revealed all its unusual qualities that had been overlooked in his initial asking. It revealed to Tyger Tyger just how unclear the information which he was searching for was, how convoluted his purpose. Uncomfortable, he projected this uncertainty upon [member="Deja Bloom"] and her credentials…but these thoughts were brief, and the toxic ambiance waned as she picked up the speed in her cadence.

Then disappeared entirely as she gave him a diagnosis. Rather common, thank god. Born of trauma, logical – objectively true. Selective Mutism. Something he could search on the holonet at the local library. A single glimmer of agency in what had been a chaotic, new frontier. It lined up.

What settled in its stead was a silence, a peace – The uneasy truce of two animals accepting that they now shared a space. Her head tilted in survey, and he watched her eyes, saying nothing. It wasn’t comfort, but they could be okay. He would never answer her question, not directly. Dr. Deja would just have to accept that the answer to her question lay in the person-shaped hole created by the details he painted around it.

Tyger Tyger reached into his side pocket; an action potentially startling due to its proximity to his firearm. He retrieved a folded piece of paper, which he opened and handed to her.

“This,” he stated vaguely. “Pretend a 6-year old drew this.”

The paper featured the familiar illustration of a child and its cosmology. The two figures stood within a small square box; a sun, a moon, a star, and a world stalked the corners of the page like monsters guarding the pillars of a mandala. There was a person with long-hair, a taller person with a beard composed of sporadic Kirby dots of black crayon. The man and the girl bore blank expressions – black dots for eyes contextualized by a single, straight horizontal line for a mouth. The man had many arms…Two extending from his torso, as traditional for humanoids, but there were an additional six extending from his back, flailed out like a praying spider.

He was on fire.

 

[Déja Bloom]

Over the course of her clinical career, Deja had been slashed at and swung at and called all manner of profanities. She had had her hair pulled and her clothes stained by drinks flung from across a room. People caught up in the storms of their own minds had a tendency to lash out indiscriminatingly, she knew. She also knew that people made desperate by their own suffering might betray their values for a chance at relief.

When [member="Tyger Tyger"]'s hand moved toward the blaster at his belt, a shot of adrenaline jumpstarted her system. The reaction was reflexive, set off by memory. On one exceptionally dreary night in the undercity of Coruscant, she had been mugged.

Where her clients were concerned, Deja discouraged self-blame when they had been victimized. Even so, after the incident in the Underword she was disappointed at herself for being so vulnerable... and for putting herself in a position where her defenselessness mattered. Tyger’s hand passed over the gun and moved to a pocket instead. As he produced a harmless slip of paper her trigger was drowned by a fresh wave of shame.

Why is there an armed client in my office, anyway? She thought to herself furiously. It would be wise for her to set some precautionary boundaries, Deja reasoned as she reached to take the page. Perhaps a gun locker in the lobby for the military types to store their gear. Yes, that feels like a good compromise. Honoring their rights while protecting m…

The busy buzz of her mind was suddenly hushed. Deja turned the paper over in her hands as she settled back. What is going on here? She nearly asked aloud. Tyger had instructed her to “pretend a 6-year old drew this”, which was an odd request. Pretend? Had the man across from her drawn this, she wondered, perhaps long ago when he was a child? Had he drawn it recently in an attempt to understand an old trauma?

No… that’s not it. She sensed no spark in that line of reasoning. Her internal compass was dead. That doesn’t feel right. She wanted answers from him but he was evading her questions. After a quiet moment of study, Deja deduced that the most therapeutic thing for her to do would be to play along.

“Children don’t know how to express themselves the way adults can.” She began, looking from the page to her client, “For them, drawing is a way they can communicate the big, complicated things they simply don’t have the words for.”

Her expression was altered by contemplation as her attention returned to the paper in her hands, “Some might say this picture holds no meaning because it was drawn by a 6-year-old, but the symbols and the colors…the way the figures are looking out… everything is important. Childrens' art is representative of their dreams and joys…”

A pregnant pause. Deja felt drawn to the many-legged spider god, his radiant aura and his mute expression, “… their nightmares.” The spell broke and she looked away. Blinking, she found her client and held him in a reassuring gaze. She dared to press him again, “Why show this to me?”

 

[Tyger Tyger]

The Irritation was back, spelled out across the atmosphere, his eyebrows, and all the lines that made up his scowl. He deferred to her expertise, surely, and he had been around the galaxy enough times for it to impress upon him that were no easy, clear answers for much of anything.

Still, he needed one for this. It was too important, too personal. Deja’s disclaimer crawled as she attempted to generalize the kid in question amongst all the others, as reaching prehistorically for highfalutin concepts he barely knew the words for himself.

Until, of course, he realized that’s not what she was saying at all.

For the sensitive, be it by Force or Free-Will, Tyger Tyger could be amorphous; an emotional shapeshifter in constant flux, but never transition – always pure, never divided. He reacted immediately, shifting moods as he hopped from atom to atom of every quantum possibility by which to interpret a single moment; the discrete arithmetic of the tactically-honed and ever-present.

It aided in Combat, but in Interpersonal Relationships? Well…

Survival has its price.

He looked at her and she looked at him back. Reassuring, judgement-reserved; her eyes as saturated in human misery as any good martyr or grief mop, and it occurred to him that he probably couldn’t shock her any more than she could shock him. The jig was up. Or maybe, he just wanted it to be. Tyger Tyger made his defense.

“You don’t expect anyone to forget something like that, but you try…I don’t know… to keep all that kind of chit on the other side of the wall. Build an island.”

He was mumbling, his volume getting lower as he retreated into himself, looking away in a thousand-yard stare that pierced through the floorboards and into the center of earth.

“Maybe that’s just all there is. I wanted to do what’s right, but it all gets in anyway…We don’t even eat meat anymore.”

Suddenly, he remembered who he was, his purpose for being here, leaning forward in engaged posture. Eye contact re-established, he attempted to level with [member="Deja Bloom"], laying his intentions bare.

“Look, I just want to know if she’s okay.”