Alena snorted. I'd say, a good kriffing could help loosen you up a bit. She almost said, but decided to keep her thoughts to herself. With Wan Min's lack of finesse at social connectivity, it was hard to gauge what she truly felt at any given point. Alena didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, least of all the only woman around who had bothered giving Alena her time over the last few years.
She nodded as Wan Min explained the positioning of the supposed fleet remains in relation to the gravitational fields of the system's various major bodies. It all appeared sound enough. In a worst-case scenario, they wasted a trip's worth of fuel.
"As long as everything's intact, we should be fine. Considering this was the location of a battle, and none of these vessels made it out themselves or were deemed worth the recovery, I'm not expecting anything to be entirely in one piece." Alena told her, leaning over Wan Min's shoulder to scour the data she had displayed.
Wan Min kept talking about reaching her dreams and cobbling together a ship worthy of the stars. Alena shared similar interests, one reason they had got on so well together to begin with, but always felt like it was a dream out of reach; just like her goals of working with Law. The pang of regret was about to subside when Wan Min sealed Alena's emotional coffin with her soft words and kind offer of a home. Alena kept staring ahead at the display screen, watching the holographic representation of a star system's drift charts turn slowly on an invisible axis without really seeing what her eyes were gazing at. This was the stone-faced Chiss thing, and Wan Min's hand on her arm pulled her out of it. The woman was right. The dark-haired, lithe-figured, full-lipped woman was right. They would get eaten alive by pirates and hostile vagabonds. They would end up dying alone and unloved. Alena didn't want that.
Out of the corner of her eye, Alena could see Wan Min looking up at her. The other woman's gaze seemed to burn into her skin, and the well of emotion festering inside her began to build to impulse. Wan Min had never been so attractive than in this moment. Alena's lips parted with a slight intake of breath she realised she'd been holding. She felt frozen in that moment, but finally, and despairingly broke free from it by opening her mouth and biting Wan Min gently on the neck. It was an expression of appreciation and acceptance. It was quick, light, and a better option than her first impulse. Alena felt her teeth sink into warm skin before she pulled away sheepishly and slapped the display off angrily with one hand. Straightening, she stepped away and grabbed a stack of datapads from the table as her cheeks began to boil.
"I'm going to review these so I'm ready for tomorrow, 'kay?" Alena grunted, waving the datapads over her shoulder for a likely confused Wan Min to see as she approached the ship's landing ramp. The datapads weren't even hers, and contained only information about the history of Thrackan Sal-Solo and the Second Corellian Insurrection, nothing about the salvage operation.
Alena smacked the ramp release in frustration as her feet struck the permacrete of the landing pad outside. It was dark and breezy, the heat of the day had ebbed and given way to the cold of the night. It felt good on her flushed skin. As the Star's End landing ramp sealed shut behind her with a hiss of hydraulics, Alena sank to a squat and rested her elbows on her knees. The datapads fell out of her hands as she ran her fingers through her hair, feeling like a fool.
"You idiot, you almost kissed her?!" She muttered to herself, her eyes wet with tears. She wiped them away, knowing they were only a measure of her self-loathing. "You kriff this up and you have no one, got it? No one." Alena hit herself in the side of the head with a fist, just hard enough to get her own attention. Her temple throbbed painfully, deservedly. She wiped her eyes again and stood, straightening her jacket and tucking a few wet strands of hair behind her ear.
Quickly Alena walked off into the night, heading not for the Arse End, but for the first bar she could spot. Out in deep space, with only droids and starships for companions, Alena forgot how lonely she could be. Wan Min's own confession had only served to remind her of this. Business partners. The term sounded friendly enough, and to share a ship instead of living by herself day in and day out, with only bar tenders to keep her company? It sounded like a sweet deal, but too good for someone like her. Wan Min could be as optimistic as she wanted, the woman knew nothing about what Alena knew about herself. She'd bailed out of a good internship, scraped by in school on her own smarts instead of working hard, and hadn't even had the guts to tell Alec to stuff it when he'd shown up to drag her back home. Wan Min thinks she wants a business partner in me, but she's wrong. Alena told herself, the woman was oblivious, growing up in privilege and abandoning it of her own free will. Idiot.
She found a bar on the outskirts of town and shut her brain up with a few shots and a glass of tihaar. The Mandalorian liquor felt good after such a personal foul up, and Alena hadn't tasted it since before her mother had left her at Alec's mercy. She'd always avoided drinking as much as her father had, but now it hardly mattered. It burned, but nicely, not in the way her eyelids had burned when she cried like an idiot before. You're thirty-two years old, buck up. You can manage on your own, just get Wan Min her stupid dream boat and get on with your life. Don't drag a good woman down with you. Alena's thoughts never seemed to shut up, a fact that drove her insane and made it hard to sleep at night. Thankfully, wherever she ended up bedding down after the liquor put her on her arse, she'd sleep like a dead baby gundark...
[member="DasGeneral"]
