Private Smells Like Tea Spirit

[Corazona von Ascania]

"Excuse me! You there!"

From a small iron-wrought table in the courtyard, Cora called out to the rough looking man she'd spied stalking along one of the partially covered corridors along the temple's perimeter.

"Come here please, I have a favor to ask of you."

Her words were polite if formal, but her tone made it clear that the blonde was used to giving orders.

If he'd approach, he'd find the Padawan poised neatly in her chair, legs crossed at the ankle and back straight. On the table sat an ornate tea pot next to a stack of delicate cups. One was already placed in front of her, steam wisping from the surface of the amber liquid.

Clutched in one hand was a sketchpad, in the other was a pencil. Cora regarded him with a mannerly smile.

"You have a most interesting face; might I draw you?"

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

The return to the Jedi temple was odd. It housed countless faces that remained as relative unknowns, unaccompanied by memories. From new students with their mandatory braids and fresh-faced knights that were eager to test themselves against the Sith among other foes of the Alliance. He wondered of the few that would recognise his own, to look upon it and remember the troublesome padawan turned lonesome sentinel. In beige and brown robes, Corin roamed the distantly familiar halls until a small voice forced his often gloomy appearance to search about.

His brow creased with the idea of himself being drawn, of being called interesting.

"You want to draw me?" He asked, rife with confusion. "Why?"

Suppose it was better to not remain so distant from all his peers.

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

"Indeed I do." Cora responded smoothly, attempting to contain her excitement over the fact that she'd successfully garnered his attention. She'd expected to be snubbed, really. He looked a little scary.

"You have a very interesting face." The blonde repeated brightly. "It's…youthful but also worn. Haunting in a way. I simply must attempt to capture your visage!"

Cora gestured to the chair opposite from her. "Please, sit. Can I offer you some tea for your trouble?"

Had it not been for the Jedi robes, she'd assumed that a man with such a beaten, scarred face had to be a commando.

"My name is Corazona von Ascania, Cora for short. I am a Padawan learner. Who might you be?"

Already, she was pouring him a cup of tea.

 

[Corin Trenor]

"Thanks," the Jedi groaned with an absence of enthusiasm; knowing his own face well enough, there was undoubtedly a bothersome truth to the description. The permanent glum glare fixed upon his face, more often than not worn with recklessly earned scuffs rather than left to heal in full and present as the pretty faced youth he once was.

Against better judgement, Corin settled into the seat with hands lost between the all-consuming fabrics of large robes.

"Corin Trenor," he greeted with a faint and fleeting hint of warmth. "Jedi Knight."

With flickering eyes, he turned to the tea. "Do you ask to draw people often, Padawan?"

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

"A pleasure to meet you, Knight Trenor." Cora responded smoothly. With practiced grace, she finished pouring the tea and placed the cup in front of him as any good hostess would.

"Do you take any cream or sugar?" Settling back into her seat, she gestured to the little canisters of the aforementioned accoutrement that had been set out.

"I don't often ask to draw people, no. But I am trying to change that!" There was a measure of pride in her bright tone, and perhaps it had been lost on Cora that the request could be considered unwanted or invasive.

Sketch pad in hand, she propped the stack of paper into her lap and against the lip of the table. Fingers wrapped around a pencil and held it out with a straight arm, one eye closing as she attempted to gage his proportions.

"I've been here for nearly a year and I've yet to meet you, Knight Trenor. Have you been away in the line of duty?"

As the tip of the pencil made contact with paper, Cora realized that his name was faintly familiar.

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

"Sugar." His tone was uncertain, equally as unsure. Corin had never taken to tea, often told the taste was bitter or best resembled heated water. He sometimes wondered what that taste would be, though often decided that it was a pointless consideration. Sugar was sweet, maybe that would make the idea of bitterly hot water nicer.

"For a time." Corin answered her latest query, "I'm the watchman of Denon, spend a lot of time there as one could expect."

In the absence of Dagon, he could not help but think. Where had he gone? Was he safe, okay, dead?

"What about you? When you're a knight, what do you hope to be?"

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

Accordingly, Cora presented him with the sugar canister, which contained a tiny spoon to scoop the desired amount of granules.

Settling back into her seat, she retrieved her pad and pencil.

"Denon?" Looking up suddenly, this seemed to give her pause. "I…have a friend from Denon. He's here now, though. He's a Padawan."

Corin would notice that she hardly looked down at the paper, instead keeping her focus on his face. When she did glance at the drawing pad, she was always quick to retrieve her eraser.

His question was enough to have her frowning in thought.

"I'm not really sure." She admitted. A lot of the other Padawans had begun falling into some niche or another—warriors, healers, slicers, spies. Cora wasn't sure where she landed. "What does a watchman do?"

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

Funneling sugar into the offered tea, Corin was uncertain as to how much was too much or too few. One after the other, his attention flickered like an unstable light between the tea and the Jedi Padawan, sketching away at something as often as she was erasing.

"Yeah?" He asked with a slither of seeming interest, sipping at the tea. It was too hot, he winced through it. "Tell him to stop by sometime. Isn't often I meet someone from home off-world, especially these days."

"Though a Jedi Watchman is..." into thought, Corin trailed, musing on his own deeds and misdeeds in equal turn; the latter outweighed the former by some considerable amount, far too much although his face did not betray him for once. "You look after a planet, or an entire star system. It becomes your job to make sure the right thing is happening and that people are safe. It isn't for all planets, only those that need them. Like Denon, as I'm sure your friend knows."

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

Cora watched discerningly as her guest poured some of the proffered sugar into his tea cup. She'd always found an odd thread of interest in observing what others added to their tea, if anything at all.

Perhaps she believed that it could tell you something about their personality. Maybe she was just curious.

"Oh, so like a police officer? Or, hm." Her lips pursed in thought as the pencil paused. "Or like a protector."

That conjured up images of Deputy Law in her mind, and she struggled to not imagine Corin dressed as the holofilm lawman for a second.

The pencil resumed its movements. On Denon, Makko has been part of a gang. Though he'd never delved into specifics, Cora understood that the Fractal State had him running spice and eventually, slicing on behalf of them to steal digital credits.

The exact type of behavior Corin was probably trying to quash on his homeworld.

"His name is Makko Vyres. Hard to miss—dark hair, tattoos on his neck and chest."

She coughed awkwardly, a pink flush dusting pale cheeks.

"Presumably."

The pencil moved a little quicker now, and the Padawan seemed to sink a little further behind her sketch pad.

"Were you born on Denon, then?"

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

Tattoos etched into the chest that rose towards the neck were often times an indication of an affiliation, to a lot of people or lifestyle. On Denon, there was no shortage of them either. Corin had come to see his share of them in his time, though his immediate bound into profiling near enough swept him up into a storm of misjudged thoughts.

"Is your friend a Jedi?" He asked, unable to prevent himself from some form of interrogation.

The street rats of Denon had their own, otherworldly charm to them. Corin wondered what one wanted out of a Jedi Padawan, if anything at all.

His mouth quirked with a slight smile, thinking. "I was," Corin answered with a small nod, "in a place called the Suicide Slums, your friend will know them. Lots of people with neck tattoos came out of there, too."

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

"He is, yes. A Padawan like me." She was quick to nod and sink her focus back to the paper.

The mention of Suicide Slums had her nose wrinkling. Cora had never been to Denon.

"What an awful name for a place."

She wondered if it was the official name, or simply a moniker that the locals used. As Corin said, Makko would likely know of it—she'd have to ask him about it later.

"How did you end up here, if I may ask?"

Cora had recently discovered that Makko had followed a girl from Denon to Coruscant. That thought hadn't sat well with her, and she wondered if Corin's path to the Jedi had been anything different. She hoped.

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

"My master," the flash of Dagon's smile crossed his mind's eye, "found me on Denon. Discovered me, as it were. He must have sensed something in me, and I was a Jedi ever since; better than the streets of Denon, as I'm sure your friend knows. He was the Watchman of Denon before me."

None bar harsh and cruel memories reigned from such a despicable place, though those very feelings made Corin question his affinity for it - the Suicide Slums, what an awful name indeed, and yet a place in which the crusading Red Mask felt most at home. In the masses with the beaten and impoverished around him, flocking to the offered aid without much in the way of hesitation. Suppose that was desperation.

"And you? How did you end up here?"

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

As Corin spoke of his Master, then pencil paused. Earnest blue eyes peered at him over the sketchpad, focusing on not only his words, but on the way the Force flowed around their conversation, on the subtle shift of his features.

Not that he was giving away much.

There were a lot of things Cora had not experienced in her lifetime. The hardship of poverty was among them.

When the conversation turned to herself, she murmured a thoughtful hum while the pencil resumed its work.

"I was sent to Coruscant at the behest of my father—the Viscount Ascania—when talks began of my homeworld, Ukatis, joining the Alliance."

She didn't sound upset about being used as a token by the political powers of her world to help ease Alliance membership. In fact, Cora had been quite pleased with her task.

Being a Jedi, she'd begun to slowly learn, was more than a task.

"The training can be hard—not to mention all of the fighting—but I quite enjoy it, as a whole.”

Taping pencil against paper, she regarded Corin with a curious frown. Perhaps her sketch wasn't shaping up quite how she imagined. Perhaps she was thinking of something else, of a conversation where her father had alluded to a change of course.

Out came the eraser.

"What would you do if someone told you that you couldn't be a Jedi anymore?"

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

"Should I be calling you 'Your Highness', then?" He teased with a small and fleeting smile, there in one moment and gone in the next. "I've met my share of royalty as a Jedi, more than I thought I ever would growing up on Denon. Or nobility, if that title suits better."

The awfully mean and terribly unclean streets of Denon knew kings and princes and lords, though only of crime; of unscrupulous trade, from those that carved their own empires out into the slums beneath the smog in a desperate attempt to rise on up to the up-city. Their ambitious wings were often set aflame, sent tumbling back down into the depths with the rest of them. Perhaps the Jedi were the angels that pried him from that hell.

Thoughtfully, Corin twisted his lip and nodded along with his own inner-musings. "I would return to Denon, help them how I could." An earnest truth, though one a Jedi could not abide by; the Red Mask was a horrid figure of fear despite the intentions, one that followed him into his darkest times. It only took a blink to steal him from the thought.

"You," he started kindly, a soft tilt to his head and rise of his brow. There were no dark thoughts upon the worn face. "Would you return to Ukatis, or would do something else? It's a big galaxy, full of opportunity."

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

"Certainly not!"

Cora snorted, then quickly quieted after having made such an unladylike sound.

"The title 'Highness' is for royalty only. Specifically for a member of the royal family other than a King or Queen, who should be addressed as Your Majesty."

She suspected that most people didn't care about the difference, which was fine—titles really only mattered in aristocratic circles, anyway.

"But, you can just call me Cora." She finished.

His answer made her smile. The Padawan had yet to learn of the red masked vigilante of Denon, the bane of spice addicts and criminals.

"That is noble of you, Knight Trenor. I am sure that the people of Denon appreciate your work as a Jedi."

He turned the query back to her, and Cora answered without hesitation.

"Oh, I'd return to Ukatis. Back to my family." It would have been expected of her. "I'd likely help my father manage our estate. Perhaps become a politician, but that would depend on the family I'd marry into."

She spared a thought to the other galactic opportunities he'd alluded to.

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

Maybe the people of Denon did.

Maybe not.

Corin nodded along while Corazona spoke, the mention of political marriages forced the lift of a brow although he could not truly speak to them. It was from another world, another life, and another scene from all that Corin had known. She seemed... calm enough about it, in the end.

"Would your opportunities vary depending on who you were married to?"

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

"Hm? Oh, probably."

The pencil continued to move a smooth and even pace, but Cora herself seemed to be lost in thought.

"The Lords of Ukatis are all different. My family is fairly traditional, but some are more modern and lax. Our planet only recently came out of a bout of isolationism, so there's bound to be a lot of differing opinions on how a noble Lord should conduct their family and business."

Her lips pursed, perhaps at a part of the drawing or at another thought.

"Though, I'd like very much to be married to someone I have a connection with."

Then her heart sank, at the thought of Makko. They'd certainly been growing closer as of late, and her inevitable marriage to a nobleman was a looming possibility.

"But that won't be for a few years, at least. My father intends for me to finish my training before he starts looking for suitors."

“And how about yourself, if I may ask? Is there a Mrs. Trenor?”

Her smile, however teasing, was at least genuine.

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

He nodded, listening. Planetary customs differed, of course, and though Corin seemed to lack in his own, understood that they were sometimes less than simple. The prospect of an arranged marriage appeared to be a less than enthusiastic time for most, though Corazona seemed to take it in stride; an accepting knowingness of her role, of her duty. If he thought on it, well and truly, perhaps he would have considered it admirable. Though Corin seemed to think less and less with the question of a partner of his own.

Corin tilted his head with pursed lips, thinking a thousand thoughts in the blink of an eye. His face hardly showed little more than some consideration for... something.

"No," he shook his head, recalling their last conversation. "Relationships can be complicated," he said both to Cora and himself, "make things messy, and the life of a Jedi can be complicated enough."

Corazona von Ascania

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

A thoughtful silence lapsed between them. It wasn't entirely uncomfortable, and Cora nodded to Corin's consideration as she sketched away.

"I see. That makes sense."

Cora had other thoughts. It wasn't her role as a Jedi that made things complicated with Makko—not that she thought so, anyway—but her status as a noblewoman. He didn't seem to mind, but she was wary of her father discovering them, so she insisted that they keep their relationship private.

He'd agreed, but she got the feeling that it was largely for her sake.

"And…done!" She announced. "I spent some extra time shading your hair." With an energetic grin, Cora flipped the sketch pad over so that Corin could see her latest masterpiece:

Corin Trenor

 

[Corin Trenor]

His smile was rarely more than the faint lift from the corner, with hidden teeth and the curve of his mouth that came with harsher eyes made to soften for all of a moment. He reclined into his seat, an almost lazy manner to his slow movement with fingers interlacing with one another over his stomach. "It looks great," he lied as easy as a summer breeze, as if the wind swept through his hair - the most... accurate detail of the drawing.

"Can I keep it?"

Corazona von Ascania