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It was a clear night, outside. Cool. Sev took a deep breath, still a little stunned by how different it was from the canned air of his ship. The wetness of the atmosphere, the greenness, was shocking.
He took a few breaths against the heaviness and looked around. The woods around Kyrimorut were black and imposing, the road a dim gray path winding away toward the distant lights of the town. It was so loud outside. Insects screaming, leaves rustling in the cool breeze, the distant yips and howls of some wild animal. It was loud inside too; Sev had laid awake for hours listening to the rush and creak of the plumbing in the walls, footsteps, the click of Mird’s claws on the wooden floors as it restlessly paced. It couldn’t have really been louder than the humming of his ship, or the occasional rattle and groan it emitted as it struggled through the currents of hyperspace. But it had been so long since he had lived with anything else. In four years he hadn’t spent a willing night off his ship.
There was a little light tossed up against the trees on the other side of the bastion, Sev realized. He still didn’t know the place to remember what was over there, who could have been up at such an hour. For a moment he thought about continuing towards the hangar, leaving his fellow insomniac to their business. But it wouldn’t hurt, either, just to take a look. He didn’t have to approach them at all. Just remind himself what was over there, give him a clue to who it could have been.
It was easy to sneak around; the landscape was all indeterminate black in the moonless night, and the soft grass didn’t make a sound underfoot. It worried Sev a little, or it would have if he wasn’t sure that Jaing and Mereel already had eyes up anywhere and everywhere imaginable, the little perverts. Sev’s nature wasn’t to give credit even if it was due, but it would be plain stupid to assume that just because Kyrimorut looked like an overgrown rabbit warren, it had the defensive apparatus to match. Not with the Nulls living there. But Sev rounded the side of the building without suffering any interruptions, and whether that was because none of the occupants knew about his nocturnal slinking about, or because none of them cared, didn’t much matter to him.
On the other side of the clearing stood a squat, small structure that Sev vaguely remembered noticing and assuming was just a shed for tools or feed. It was about a quarter of the size of Kyrimorut’s aboveground structure and roofed in sod as well; a small window set into the single vertical wall was spilling out the beam of light that had caught Sev’s eye. But it wasn’t like the hangar or the speeder shed; looking at it didn’t tell him much about the purpose of the thing, or about who might have been inside. Curiosity got the better of him.
No telling when the last time that had happened.
He crossed the clearing fast, hugging the edges on instinct. A low hum of ventilation met him as he crept up on the building. A workshop of some kind, probably. Maybe it was Parja inside, but Sev couldn’t think why, not when she had Fi to warm her bed here, and her shop in town. Maybe it was Fi in there, tinkering around with skills he picked up from the wife. Could have been one of the Nulls, too. And Atin was always restless and standoffish, liking his space. It wouldn’t have surprised Sev to find him up when nobody else was up, out where nobody else was even sleeping.
Sev didn’t much like to think about Atin, these days. It put a sick, confusing feeling in the pit of his stomach, thinking of the man who had hated Sev relentlessly, who had tried and nearly succeeded at killing Vau. In Sev’s memory Atin wasn’t much more than a cornered animal, lashing out or snarling warily from the edges of the room. These days, though, it seemed like Atin was just quiet. Even the scar across his face had gone pale and faded, right along with the rest of him. Sev had heard from Mereel early into his stay with Kyrimorut that Atin had called cin vhetin with Vau. No, not recently, Mereel had said, his eyes widening playfully. Right at the beginning, when we all came out here. Made his promise, stuck to it ever since.
That had put Sev in a mood for the rest of the night, and it hadn’t lifted by the next morning. It had been hard to look at Vau from the get-go, bracing himself for the kick he knew was headed for his ribs, the retaliation he was due for being alive when all that time he had been missed and searched for and mourned for dead, so Sev had found his gaze wandering over to Atin, looking for something—he wasn’t sure what. Shelter? Advice? Recognition? Maybe just acknowledgement from the one person Sev knew who had kicked back against Vau. Acknowledgement, maybe, that there had been a conflict between them and Sev had chosen the wrong side. But Atin didn’t look back. He had welcomed Sev warmly enough on that first awful day, sure, put his hand on Sev’s shoulder when Kal had given him the news about Delta. But he was so placid, so drained. Always one of the first to leave a room. It was like he was barely even there at all, just a body going through the motions, the man Sev remembered locked away somewhere deep inside.
It was—it was unsettling.
Sev was close enough to lay his hand against the sloping side of the shed, and so he did. The grass was soft and cold and when he pressed down he could just barely feel the faint hum of the ventilation system vibrating up through the sod. He looked up, tipping his head back and gazing up at the trees, and past them the sky. It was filled with stars and not as dark as the branches of the trees which stabbed crookedly into the clearing. It felt bad to stand in place in the open like that but he did anyway. He stood like that for so long that he swayed with vertigo and black spots drifted over his vision when he lifted his head again.
I want to sit on top of this building and look at the stars, Sev thought calmly. It was if all at once his body had decided to remind him how tired he was.
Maybe, he thought, whoever is in there will be able to hear me climb up on the roof. Then they’ll come out and ask what the hell I’m doing, and then I’ll really have to fucking explain myself, won’t I?
In a way he felt that he was trying to persuade himself not to. He knew that he wanted to; he had no interest anymore in continuing on to the hangar and his ship, not yet. They seemed so far away, in the dark, when there was light here. He clambered cautiously up the domed side of the shed. His footfalls didn’t make a noise, cushioned by the sod, and the frame didn’t creak beneath his wight. When he reached the apex of the curve he sat down, and then he lay back and stared up at the sky. It was cold, lying down, though not as cold as the ground would have been. The vibrations rumbled through his skull, muffled only a little by the sod. It was almost nice, actually, the faint rumble reaching into his stiff joints, his aching shoulder. He felt so old sometimes. He felt so tired. And it was the worst of all on nights like these when he felt restless and unhappy and his chest ached for no reason.
The stars were beautiful on this side of Mandalore. It was so remote that the sky was choked with them. Not too long ago—Sev had to think back, count the weeks—he had been drifting out there. He remembered the creaking groan his ship had let out, the awful roar that echoed through the hull as the hyperdrive transmission jammed, gave, and sent the ship spinning wildly out of hyperspace, one wing catching and shredding on the sub-dimensional boundary. After everything he’d seen, everything he’d been through, the emergency landing had still made his heart pound so hard that he’d thought it might burst. He’d been shaking as he limped up to the road, and if the manager of the tiny airstrip had noticed his teeth chattering as they drove into town she hadn’t said, but Sev had felt like his whole head was rattling with the force of it. He’d thought he might never get in that ship again. These days he thought all the time, I want to go home.
The door of the shed opened with a quiet hiss, somewhere behind and below Sev. He startled badly, clenching his fists against the instinct to reach for a weapon that wasn’t there. The light shut off. Sev listened, body stringing itself tight, but the footsteps crossed the grass, moving away until Sev couldn’t hear them anymore. Then there was the nearly-silent click of one of Kyrimorut’s manual side doors, the soft noise again as it closed. That was all.
He wanted to go, then, but didn’t want to go to his ship anymore and didn’t want to go back to his room in the compound, and so he lay there until the ventilation system shut off and he started to shiver. What if he had just gone and knocked on the door? Now he’d never kriffing find out who had been in there. He could still try and get in, but he probably wouldn’t have access. Anyway, he didn’t really want to. He should have just knocked.
#End