First Reply The End of a New Beginning

[Isildor Laskaris]

THE END OF A NEW BEGINNING
"Don’t get any big ideas — they’re not gonna happen"

TRUCE, NAR SHADDAA

Isildor strolled the interior of Truce to glances and whispers. Membership was by invitation, invitations were by reputation, and reputation was the one currency the Hapan always has in excess.

He came through the private lift still wearing the gloves.

Not tactical ones, just thin black leather, the kind that looked like an affectation until you noticed how deliberately he hadn't taken them off yet. A small tell, if anyone here were the type to notice small tells. Most weren't. The ones who were knew better than to say so out loud.

The job was done. Clean, quiet. He hadn't stopped moving since. The lift ride up, the walk through the atrium, the particular restlessness of a body that had spent the last several hours being very still and very precise and now had nowhere to put all that leftover current; none of it showed on his face. It showed, if you knew where to look, in the way his eyes kept finding the exits in a room of glut and excess.

The disgraced prince went straight to the bar and set both palms flat on the polished marmer like he meant to hold it down.

"Whatever's pouring," he told the bartender, "for everyone. My tab." A beat, a grin that arrived a half-second after the words did, like it had to catch up.

A murmur went through the room, the good kind, the kind money and mystery bought in equal measure at a place like this. Nobody at Truce asked questions they didn't already know the polite way to avoid answering, and Isildor Laskaris buying a round with that particular glint in his eye was, by now, a known quantity to the regulars. Something had happened. Something usually did, around him. Nobody needed the details to enjoy the drinks.

He finally peeled the gloves off one finger at a time, unhurried now, folding them and tucking them into a jacket pocket. The wired feeling hadn't left him. It just had somewhere better to go now; into the noise of the room, the clink of glasses, the low hum of a hundred conversations that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with why he'd come here instead of anywhere quieter.

He raised his own glass to no one in particular and everyone at once.

"To the ones who don't have to worry about tomorrow," he said, "and the rest of us, who apparently do."

Open​

 

[Amara Zambrano]

This wasn't the typical hot spot on Nar Shaddaa, in fact this was quite possibly one of the only places she could think of, across the stars even, that Amara felt she could just exist as she was. All of the quirks and flaws that made her who she was still lingered there, somewhere just under the surface, but it felt like time stood still here. The clientele was quite a bit more exclusive, a consequence of being an invited one, and everyone knew not what questions weren't meant to be asked and what answers weren't meant to be given. Here she was just another woman, a more demure, perhaps muted, shade of the more social butterfly she could be once she stepped out of the door. Her clothes were just as quiet as she was tonight, an uninviting black turtleneck and pants that hid everything except her hands and face. Even her hair was purposefully done to minimize the attention she got, hours of careful curling and a not insignificant amount of hairspray and gel giving it the signature tousled bed-head look.

She had hardly paid any attention to the man strolling up to the bar, her thoughts floating light years away in a sea of alcohol that she'd been drinking for the last several hours. This was later than she'd usually been, normally the sort to show up when the crowd was quite a bit more sparse and significantly less loud, but she didn't hate the change in atmosphere as the day had dragged on, either. It wasn't until she noticed a small trickle of the whiskey she'd been sipping splash out of her glass and onto her hand that her focus was pulled back from the depths of space. "Huh?" She questioned, her voice hardly even a whisper, as her eyes - the only bright thing about her tonight - searched for the reason why the glass she had her hand resting next to was suddenly filled back up. She got her answer hardly a moment later upon realizing that the shadow cast over her was from Isildor Laskaris - the man who'd evidently paid for a round of drinks for the whole place.

She shot the bartender a look, confused, and was given a dismissive shrug in return.

Then came the bravado, or whatever it was when someone made a little speech for cheers after buying the entire place a round of drinks. The part of her that normally would have ignored him, or maybe rolled her eyes, was about as inebriated as could get, however, so she just raised her glass absentmindedly to him as her eyes worked him over. He seemed familiar, not in the sense that she thought that she might know him but rather that he carried himself like, and even looked the part of, the sorts of men that ran in the same circles as her father - in fact he almost reminded her of her brother, what with the dangerous pretty-boy vibes she got from him. 'Maybe handsome is a better word?' She thought as she lifted the drink to her lips and sucked it down. He definitely looked like he was a little more rugged than polished, at least through her hazily drunk judging gaze, but not quite as poorly groomed as some of the other ilk that filtered onto Nar Shaddaa. At some point she must've positioned the glass back on the bar in such a way that the bartender had taken it upon himself to fill her glass again because she felt the familiar cool splash of alcohol on her fingertips several moments later. She blinked, the slight sting at the inside corners of her eyes telling her she'd been staring.

"Shouldn't worry about what you can't control."

She seemed rather surprised to hear her own voice, almost as if she'd just vomited the words and hadn't remembered it happening. "You're cut off." She heard from behind her, although she didn't quite care - the whiskey wasn't strong enough anyway. Sometime between downing the previous drink and the last she had turned around to rest her back against the bar, elbows resting against its ledge, as if to acknowledge the stranger as much with body language as with words. "That'll only make it worse." Amara said, with a nod in the direction of the man behind the bar handling the glass he'd just confiscated from her. Sure she was clearly one step away from too far gone herself, but she also seemed to be sobering up rather visibly at the same time almost from the moment she'd finished her drink.

"Just so happens there's an empty seat right here, if you'd like to make things better."

She turned back around, hunched forwards slightly, and stared into her manicured hands with seeming disinterest. "Or worse, if that's what you're after."