for_everyone | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

She's awake. Her face is flat against some smooth surface, the smell of it quick to help her remember the mat. The sandcrawler, the Jawas. One arm is tucked beneath her, the other out, her fingers also pressing into the mat. She feels the fabric of her hood tucked against her forehead, her lekku, and there's something on top of her, lying horizontal across her, set just above her elbow. Hera can hear slow, steady breathing, can feel it along the back of her neck. It's all she can hear. The crawler has stopped.

Hera opens her eyes. There's bright white light, coming up from the grate beneath them. She shifts, turning over, and realizes what's lying across her is Kanan's arm. She must have moved closer to him in her sleep. Hera lifts herself up, and slowly tries to move his arm off from her and back to his side, quietly and gently enough to not wake him. Maybe that's something she should think about, be bothered by or – not. But for now it doesn't hold her interest. She rolls back to the edge of the mat, looking down into the room below, but though the lights are on, and the combustion chamber reignited, there's no one inside.

Now she hears more – voices. Scurrying footsteps outside. Have they arrived somewhere? Hera doesn't feel like they've slept that long. She pulls out her chrono – nearly four hours. It's the middle of the night. What's gotten the rest of them up?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"The same," she answers. "Not the eating but. Violence. Torturing those they don't kill outright. I guess there's only so much anyone can know, if that's the case."

"The Jawas seem to get on with them. Or . . . at least this group of them?"

Maybe they're seasonal, the conflicts. Or there's a complex web of interconnected relationships that plays into trade vs conversation vs violence.

Maybe they just don't like outsiders?

"Maybe they're not seen as invaders."

Hera's pretty quick to jump to that possibility.

Kanan doesn't smile, just huffs out a considering breath.

And after a minute --

"I have to think that at least helps. And it could be the whole story, too. I just -- I wonder."

The first space travelers to reach Tatooine was by now ancient history. If things had ever been different, when it came to outsiders' encounters with the Tuskens, Hera had never heard of it.

"I -"

But then she hears that thought in her head before she says it, and cuts it off. There's no way she'll make it sound like what she means.

Kanan just looks back at her, waiting for a long moment to see if she'll continue on her own.

Then --

"What?"

"No, I don't -"

She lifts her hands, pressing them to her forehead, trying to make this work.

"Maybe I could - kind of understand that, sometimes."

Oh.

Yeah.

Ryloth.

"I can see that," Kanan says slowly, carefully. He, too, is trying to make this work, to understand without giving offense, or taking any. Because she's right. The Twi'lek would have been a lot better off if outsiders -- invaders -- hadn't decided they'd be easy to make a profit from.

"For -- and it's not a terrible strategy. I mean. It wouldn't have been."

"I didn't mean..."

She's not sure what she meant. Hera takes a deep breath. closing her eyes against what little light they have. "I don't mean it's right. And if we'd ended up facing them, I would've gone down fighting if I had to.

"But I... I can understand seeing invaders. And wanting nothing to do with them."

And she does wonder, right or not, what might have been different had Ryloth's visitors and invaders alike encountered a more violent response.

"Survival makes for hard choices," Kanan says, after a long moment of silence.

"Maybe the Tuskens turned down 'right' in favor of 'effective'. I -- can see why people make that choice, I think. I don't agree with it, but -- "

Everyone has to draw their own lines. Civilizations, too.

"That can be a dangerous way to think."

But she's not disagreeing. And she'd be lying if she said she'd never thought like that. Sometimes there are only bad choices - and sometimes that's an excuse. And she's not entirely sure what she can decide, about the Tuskens, or for them.

"It's been effective in keeping them safe," she murmurs. "Out of the hands of slavers. In their lands, mostly. But it hasn't kept people away from here."

They're just another danger, something common in the Outer Rim. "And so many beings don't want to be here in the first place."

"Even the Hutts don't really want to be here, I'd guess. It's just . . . convenient."

His tone twists that last into a dirty word.

"But somehow that doesn't seem to have helped the Tuskens any. Or the Jawas."

Or anyone else, for that matter.

"The Hutts had a choice about it."

She had to wonder how many had gotten caught between the Tuskens and the slavers.

"I feel like that says a lot, somehow."

He rubs his forehead, pushing back an incipient headache. (Hutts are the worst.)

"But yeah, they did. And do."

Hera takes another deep breath. There's a part of her longing to move closer to Kanan again, if only for a few seconds of stability, security, while she was felt so unstable.

She closes her eyes. "We can't know what would've happened. If things had been different on Ryloth. It's not the same here."

Nothing yet has been found to mine under the dune seas of Tatooine. And the society the Twi'leks had built long before the first invaders was simply nothing like what the Tuskens seemed to have now.

Edited 2018-12-23 06:58 (UTC)

"No, it isn't. Even when pieces might be similar, or related -- "

He breaks off, and it takes real effort not to reach out for her hand, just for the briefest touch.

Um.

"But I shouldn't . . . I just mean I can see why you'd wonder. About it. Sometimes."

Her eyes flicker open. By now, much of the light has died down again. She can barely make out the edges of Kanan's faces, the line of his shoulder.

"If we'd managed it, to keep everyone out, stay isolated - maybe we'd have our own secret spacefarers. Or maybe we'd just be like them, but on Ryloth - no one'd know anything about us, except to stay away."

Kanan takes a moment to watch Hera's face, the faintest traces of light limning the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her lekku.

"It'd be a shame for you not to be out in space, Hera," he says at last. "You belong here. You all deserve the stars."

"But if I could trade being out here for none of that ever happening - no invasions, no slavers..."

It didn't matter really, because there would never been any offer like that.

Still, she murmurs, "I'd have to."

"Me, too," Kanan says quietly.

He's still watching her, carefully keeping his hands pressed against the ground next to him.

"But that's not really a choice we're ever going to have to make."

Not about the Twi'leks, anyway. Not about Ryloth.

"No, it's not."

She waits a few seconds after that, the only sound the gears of the crawler around then. Then, slowly, she reaches to check her chrono again. More than six hours now.

"We should probably try to get some more sleep."

He exhales, trying to keep the sound quiet, even with the grind of the gears taking up the space around them.

"Do you think you can?"

"Yeah."

She tilts her head forward, her lekku stretching gently along the mat. "It reminds me a little of home, in here."

"Hey," Kanan says, smiling into the dark, "Whatever it takes."

He moves to lie down, too, wriggling around to try to make his back comfortable without extending his legs out into a well-traveled area.

"I might meditate for a while. It's . . . Still kind of stuffy in here. For me."

"Okay."

She curls her own legs up, tucking her arms to her chest.

"Is there anything I can..."

She lets it drift off, as she realizes it's a silly thing to ask. What can she possibly do to help him, to make it less stuffy in here? But by now, she can't un-ask it.