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At first, he doesn’t know where the flatcakes came from. He only knows that they appeared on the counter sometime during the night, or possibly that morning, arranged neatly on a white plate with blue and red flowers painted along the edge. He avoids them with the same fervor one avoids a plague, not even daring to pick one up for closer inspection.
That’s how his brother finds him: sitting across from the plate of flatcakes, a little suspicious, but mostly confused.
“The hell are you doing?” his brother asks.
Darth Festus plants his hands on the counter and pushes himself back from the plate of desserts. “Where did these come from?”
“Force, what is this, the Imperial Inquisition?” Darth Ferrus slides the plate closer to him and snatches up one of the flatcakes. “Yumi dropped them off.”
“Who the hell is Yumi?”
“Our neighbor.”
Festus’s first impulse is to say they don’t have any neighbors, but of course that’s not even close to correct. He can well imagine Ferrus’s snide response if he were to suggest he believed such a thing. Instead, he says, “What neighbor?”
“Gods,” Ferrus mutters. “Haven’t you see the little old lady who lives next door? You share a wall with her apartment, remember?”
He wants to say of course he remembers, but he doesn’t. They’ve been planetside ever since they moved into this place, and he can count on one hand the number of times he’s left the apartment. Even leaving his room is a once or twice daily thing these days.
Ferrus scowls at him. “Maybe if you got off your stupid datapad once in a while, you’d have a kriffing clue who I’m talking about.”
Festus leans one elbow on the counter. “You’re taking this really personally. Little old lady, you say?” He tilts his head to one side and smirks. “She’s not exactly your type, is she?”
Ferrus shoves him hard in the shoulder. “Shut up. Don’t be a moron. I don’t give a damn about her. But we need to keep a lower profile than the last place. And that includes getting along with the neighbors and blending in.”
Blending in? Festus scoffs. “You know, I put up with enough of your antics, I don’t need to deal with some random old lady’s, too.”
“I’m not saying you need to do anything, idiot. In fact, it’s probably better if you never talk to her. Or anyone.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to ruin your cover, would I?”
Ferrus growls and smacks a palm against the counter. “I’m telling you that you can spend all day doing exactly what you’ve been doing.”
“And what’s that?”
“Staring at holos of that little princess, and whatever else you do when you’re thinking about her.”
It’s hard to articulate what he feels in response. Fury, yes, but more muted than it’s been in the past. Denial, certainly, because he refuses to believe that he’s as far gone as his brother seems to think. Desire, but only because the mere mention of her brings those feelings rushing to the surface, where it’s harder to stuff them back down. Shame, too. He pretends it’s not an issue, but it never really goes away.
Ferrus shoves him again. “Got you pegged, huh? Just stay inside when we’re not working, and you can do whatever the hell you want. I won’t say a word.” He pulls the plate of flatcakes toward him. “And these are mine, by the way.”
Festus eyes the dessert dismissively as he leaves the kitchen. “Never said they weren’t.”
Despite his brother’s warning, he makes the mistake of going outside the apartment a few days later, and finds himself facing down the old neighbor, Yumi, carrying so many grocery bags her head is barely visible behind them. She spots him in spite of her impeded view.
“Would you mind terribly?” She shifts the bags in her arms, nearly spilling groceries all over the floor. Festus whips a hand out on instinct, catching one of the bags before it can fall. He stands to the side as she keys open her door and tries to hand her the bag. “Oh, could you carry that inside for me?”
He follows her into the apartment, calculating how quickly he can get out of this situation and back into the solitude of his room.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess. I haven’t had a droid for decades, and it’s just me here.”
He sweeps his gaze across the room; it’s cluttered, yes, but very tidy, all things considered. There’s a pair of overstuffed chairs in the sitting area, with mismatched dark floral prints and a fuzzy magenta blanket across the back of one. They sit facing a cracked holoscreen and a floor-to-ceiling shelf of ceramic knickknacks and holocubes and datacards, and some flimsiplast sketches on little plasteel easels.
On the other side of the room is a small kitchen with barely enough room for the wooden table at its center. A clay-colored pot with a few spiky, goblet-shaped red flowers sits atop the table. A trail of plush, forest green carpet leads to what he assumes is the apartment’s sole bedroom, in an exact mirror of the one Festus and his brother occupy. Unlike theirs, this one looks like an actual home.
“Here,” Yumi continues, closing the door behind her. She takes the bag from his arms. “You can have a seat or look around, either way is fine. I’ll put on some tea.”
He doesn’t bother telling her that he’s never had a cup of tea in his life or that a hot drink doesn’t sound particularly appealing right now. Instead, he resigns himself to his temporary fate and resumes the study of his surroundings.
“Four weeks.” Her voice floats from the kitchen amid a clattering of cups. “That’s how long since you moved in, right? I don’t mean to sound like a snoop. Only I was a bit ill around the time you moved in, and didn’t get a chance to welcome you properly.”
Well, that explains the flatcakes. “Four weeks sounds right.” Has it already been that long? The days and weeks tend to blur together.
“I see your brother most days, but not you.” A cupboard bangs closed. “Such a nice boy. Always holds the lift for me.”
Festus turns to examine a holo on the wall, mostly to hide a smirk as he tucks that information away for later. A nice boy, huh? If she only knew.
She fills a kettle and plops it on the stove, then shuffles over to join him. “Do you like it?” She nods at the holo. “My son painted that when he was around your age.”
Festus looks at the holo more closely. A swirling ring of dark, cloudlike gas tilts diagonally against a backdrop of stars veiled in carmine red. At the center of the cloud is a sun, or an explosion maybe. It’s not the sort of thing he’d expect to see side-by-side with fuzzy blankets and playful animal ceramics, although maybe it fits with the moody florals on her furniture.
A muted sort of sadness tinges her presence, an old scar left in the wake of an older wound. “He was killed in action, long time ago.”
Festus glances at her before casting an eye around the apartment. There are no holos of other people to be seen. “You don’t have any other family?”
“A nephew who comes to see me from time to time. He’s a good boy.”
He won’t tell her that a truly good nephew would have gotten her the hell out of this place. It’s not his business anyway.
“If you like this, you should see Ando’s drawings.” She turns to face the shelving unit on the opposite wall and beams up at him. “He was so talented. He got that from my late husband.”
Festus trails after her as she crosses the room to look at the sketches on the shelf. They depict an eclectic array of scenes, some featuring rolling meadows and winding streams, idyllic and picturesque, and others that zero in on the most mundane of minutia, like the worn buttons on an old conservator or the porous surface of a sea sponge. There’s little to unify them other than the artist’s reliance on short, abrupt pen strokes.
The tea kettle whistles, and Yumi makes a shooing gesture toward one of the floral chairs. “Sit, sit! I’ll bring your tea out here.”
He does as she asks, sinking slowly into the cushion. It smells faintly of old roses and citrus fruit, which seems like a weird combination, but what does he know. She returns a moment later with two steaming cups and hands him one. He accepts it without a word, staring down at the dark amber liquid.
“Don’t be shy,” she says with a laugh.
He raises the cup to his lips and blows across the surface before taking a first, tentative sip. He can’t identify the precise flavor, but it’s strong, way stronger than the stuff he normally consumes.
“Like it?” Yumi asks as she sits in the other chair. Her eyes are alight with eager expectation.
“It’s strong,” he replies. He takes a bigger sip. It’s not bad, really. He wouldn’t seek it out on his own, but he can see the appeal.
His answer seems to please her. “I found this blend in a shop in Shidori District. Closest I’ve ever come to the one my grandmother used to make.”
He looks at her over the rim of his cup. It’s truly perverse that he should be sitting here with her, drinking her much beloved tea and letting her think he’s any kind of normal. He doesn’t know how Ferrus does it.
“But enough about me,” she continues with a self-deprecating wave. “Tell me about you.”
Festus shrugs. “Not much to tell.”
“Nonsense! Everyone has a story. I guarantee you’re more interesting than you think.”
He briefly imagines the coronary he’d give her if he revealed even a fraction of the truth. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, for starters, do you have any family?”
The spires of the Sith temple on Coruscant rise dark and forbidding in his mind’s eye, as do the towering statues of ancient dark lords on the grave world of Korriban, and the blood-soaked halls of a decrepit mansion on Vjun.
“No,” he says without feeling. A lie and not a lie. “It’s just the two of us.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
He shrugs again, takes a third sip. “We’re used to it.”
She nods sagely. “My husband and I came here when we were just starting out. Didn’t know a soul, left both our families behind. It was difficult for a long time, but we managed to build a good life.” Her eyes get a misty, distant look that he recognizes without knowing why. “You know, there was a time when I fancied I might become a singer? My husband always said I had the loveliest voice in twelve systems. Of course, that was before we had Ando.”
She says it like he’s supposed to have any idea what she means, like he ought to know all about families and the kind of life that indulges dreams. He drains the rest of his tea in a single gulp. Yumi smiles back at him.
“If there’s one thing I wish I could have had a chance to do, it’s sing at the Malija Pavilion. The acoustics, and that architecture…” She closes her eyes for a long moment, then opens them to gaze warmly at him. “What about you? If you could be anyone for a day, who would you be?”
He sets his cup on the table between them. What would she do if he just got up and left? Not a word of explanation, just went back to his apartment and his room and his datapad, and his interminable obsession, and never came back out? Would she ask about him, bring another plate of flatcakes to their door, say she hopes he’s okay? It’s sick, how easy it is to make someone care. Tell the right lies, avoid the wrong truths, and you’re in, for no better reason than that they can’t see all the heinous things on the inside. It’s absurd, and it’s hilarious, and so, so twisted.
“No one,” he says.
“Oh? Now that’s a fascinating answer. Why no one?”
Gods, what is he doing here? He sits forward in his chair, eyes drifting to the holopainting on the wall. It might be the birth of a galaxy, or it might be the end.
“Because one day isn’t enough,” he tells her. “One day would be worse than nothing at all.”
She doesn’t seem bothered by his response. “That’s certainly a grim take.”
“You asked.”
“I did indeed.” Her smile is subtler this time, but every bit as sage. She twists in her chair, aiming a withered finger at the kitchen. “You see that flower in there? It’s called the protea, and it’s a survivor. It thrives in harsh conditions, be it drought or wildfires or neglect. Even if I wanted to kill it, I don’t think I could.”
Festus stares at the flower, at its array of spiky crimson petals, its leathery green leaves. “There supposed to be a lesson in that for me?”
It’s the old lady’s turn to shrug. “Who knows? I’d guess there’s as much wisdom in it as you want there to be.”
He exhales slowly, inaudibly. She’s just a lonely old lady living in the past, unable to accept that her life now is empty and meaningless. Pretending she can still be whatever she was before.
“I should go.” He stands up and heads to the door without waiting for a response. She doesn’t try to stop him, though. He can sense her disappointment, but also her resignation. He wonders how many times she has reached out like this, and failed.
“Thank you for stopping by,” she says as the door closes behind him.
He wakes to the muffled thumping of footsteps coming from the other side of his wall, and after listening to them tromp around for a bit, he checks his chrono. It’s midday, which means Yumi should be at work. He stretches out with his senses, searching for any sign of his brother, but the rest of the apartment is empty.
A crash shakes the wall next to him, and he launches out of bed, pushing hair out of his eyes with one hand and calling his boots to him with the other. By the time he opens his front door, the crashing and thumping have ceased, and the exterior hallway is vacant and eerily still, save for a low, unfamiliar hum.
For a few seconds, he considers turning around and going right back to bed, but as he glances at Yumi’s door, the hum gets louder. It’s then that he realizes the door is slightly ajar, and the humming noise is the sound of its damaged retracting mechanism.
Festus lays a hand on the door and hesitates. Why bother with it? With any of it? He doesn’t care about anyone in this place, or in any other place. He lost the capacity for that a long time ago. And it’s not like there’s anything remotely interesting or challenging about breaking into an old lady’s apartment. What would he have to gain by going in there? Would it satisfy his amusement or his curiosity?
Aren’t you the least bit curious, my boy? I know you are. You don’t have to hide it from me.
He braces his hands against the edge of the door and pushes it open just enough to enter, causing the motor to whine violently in protest. The scene that greets him couldn’t be further removed from the one he’d seen a few days earlier. Every piece of furniture is overturned, every cabinet door is ajar. The holoscreen hangs precariously from it’s mount, new cracks spidering across its surface. Ceramic shards litter the floor in front of the shelf, gleaming like jagged confetti in the lamplight. He steps gingerly around the discarded magenta blanket, pausing for a moment as he considers whether to pick it up.
The kitchen is possibly worse than the sitting area. It looks like every dish lies in pieces on the floor, along with Yumi’s favorite flower. It’s a survivor, she’d told him. Even if I wanted to kill it, I don’t think I could.
He leaves the flower be, too.
Her son’s painting still hangs in its appointed spot, untouched by the destruction. It might be the only thing that is. When Yumi arrives home hours later, after Festus has returned to his room and sits quietly against the shared wall, she sobs for a good ten minutes before the place goes eerily silent. He can sense her moving around, cleaning the damage. Picking up each and every piece. The dishes, the animal figurines, the blanket, the protea flower, the chairs…
No, he didn’t pick up the chairs, even though they’re likely too big for her to lift on her own. He didn’t pick up anything. He might as well have been a ghost, bearing silent witness to the desecration. Tethered to a world he will never again be part of.
It isn’t footsteps that wake him that night, but voices.
“Why do you come around here?” he hears Yumi say through the wall. “I already told you, Kinu has a steady job, he doesn’t need your money!”
A man’s voice shouts her down. “Shut your mouth! Your precious Kinu left you high and dry, but we’re still gonna collect.”
“What do you think you’re doing? Get your hands off—”
“Shut it, you old crone! Get inside!”
Festus slaps the keypad and steps into the hallway to find Yumi barricading her doorway with her small body, trying to hold back a man half her age and twice her size.
“Hey!” Festus snaps, drawing the man’s attention. “You were here earlier today.”
The man sneers, still holding on tight to his prey. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy.”
Something in the way he says it sends a shock of anticipation through his fingertips. “I’m talking about the mess you made this afternoon when you smashed up this lady’s apartment.”
Another sneer, this one more vicious than the last. “Wasn’t me, and maybe you haven’t noticed, but the lady and I are a little busy.”
The jittery thrill of anticipation vanishes like a flame suddenly snuffed out, and all that’s left in its place is a sense of cold inevitability. “It was you.”
The man pushes Yumi into the apartment and advances on Festus, pointing a finger in his face. “Yeah? Why don’t you prove it? Better yet, why don’t you take your pretty little face inside before I make a mess of it? This don’t concern you.”
Right, then.
He grabs the man’s wrist and wrenches it hard enough to crack, eliciting an anguished howl. “It is my concern, actually, because I was trying to sleep, and here you are making all this fragging noise.” He shoves the man backward into Yumi’s apartment, knocking him into one of the overstuffed armchairs. The chair topples over, pinning him under it.
“Look at this place,” Festus says as he advances on the man. “Does it look like she has anything to pay you with?” He brushes the chair aside with a wave of his arm, sending it careening into the wall. The shelf of trinkets shudders at the impact, the remaining ceramic figurines clinking against each other in a discordant symphony. The man tries to scramble out of Festus’s path, only to be caught in an invisible snare.
“What the hell?” He thrashes his arms, clawing at the plush rug, unable to escape. “What is this? What is this?”
Festus stands over him and flashes a grin. “This is what happens when you piss me off.” He reaches out, drawing the man up so that his toes hover just off the floor.
“No! No, no, wait. You’re making a huge mistake. Listen to me, you damned freak, I said you’re making a mistake!”
As if his whole existence hasn’t been one big, cosmic mistake. He looks into the man’s eyes and shakes his head. “Story of my life.”
He twists his hand clockwise, snapping the man’s neck. The body hits the floor, and Yumi screams.
“What did you do?” She backs into the kitchen counter, hands covering her mouth. “Oh gods… oh heavens…”
He takes a step back from the body and looks over at her. He could ask her if she’s hurt, if she’s okay, if she has somewhere to stay since her home is now the scene of a crime, but nothing makes it past his lips. She’s shaking, sobbing, absolutely horrified, and he can’t say a damn thing, not even a stupidly matter-of-fact response to her question. Isn’t he a fragging Dark Lord of the Sith? This isn’t his first kill, not by a long shot, and it’s far from the first time someone has looked at him like he’s a devil incarnate.
He leaves her there, without looking back. He leaves her to her tears and her disbelief and the violent upending of her world, and he runs straight to his room to pack a bag and call his brother.
Ferrus arrives soon after, barreling into the apartment, fresh from whatever pleasurable hole he crawled out of. “What the hell is going on?”
Festus emerges from his room and tosses a duffel bag at his twin. “We have to leave, now. Grab your stuff and let’s go.”
“Slow down, didn’t you say it was just the one guy?”
“One guy and one witness.”
“Oh come on. You think anyone cares about some thug getting killed in this neighborhood?”
Festus tosses his bag on the counter and begins checking under all the furniture to make sure he didn’t miss anything. “I think I don’t want to spend one more minute in this dump. Now come on.”
His brother shakes his head. He’s clearly having trouble grasping the situation. “But you saved her life. She should be grateful. That roach would have done a lot worse the next time.”
“Yeah,” he says dryly, “I’m a regular hero.”
Ferrus’s eyes narrow. “I didn’t say that.”
Festus waves a hand in the air. “I don’t care, I just want to be gone.”
His twin hesitates, eyes on the wall separating their apartments. “You really think she’ll give us up?”
How can he explain it? That look they get, when they realize what you are, what you’ve always been. When they see you for the monster you are. Even after all these years, Ferrus still doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t want to. Like little old Yumi, he still clings to the last vestiges of a life that’s already gone.
Festus doesn’t have that luxury. He’s known the truth for too long to pretend otherwise.
“It’s not worth waiting around to find out,” he says, placing a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”