fulfilling a promised lesson on the fine art of blasting things ...

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Walking back to the Millennium Falcon through the Nexus has gotten a little bit easier each time.  The first time, it took him more than an hour to get back despite the fact that his ship has always been parked about a thousand yards away from a path that leads to the forum.  The shiftable nature of this place makes no walk to and from anywhere as straightforward as it seems, but you can get used to it.

 

For a while, he cleans up the areas that he thinks both he and Verity are likely to be in for a while - the cockpit and the lounge especially, but also near the entry ramp and the living quarters.

 

He did promise lessons on how to fly and in due course, he will get her into the sky with him ... but he's still doesn't have a ton of fuel yet and the priority was always teaching her how to use the blasters.  So he's pulled four weapons out of the storage lockers, completely disassembled them and cleaned them.  He also discharges all, but one, of the plasma magazines.

 

They get placed them on top of the holochess board, which, sadly, is among one of the biggest flat surfaces available to him on the YT-1300 and then, he takes a shower and slips into a light weight pair of pants.  It seems to take a long time for him to drift off in the small bunk that he's claimed for himself.  The sound of the winter wind skips across the surface of his ship and makes a low howling sort of sound.

 

This is one of the reasons it's always preferable to put your ship in a proper hanger, but, when you're Han Solo, you work with what you got.  After a few hours he wakes up, not knowing what time it is, until he opens the entry ramp and looks outside.

 

It seems too early for her to arrive.  The sun hasn't even reached the apex of it's path yet, so he decides to lay back down.  Leaving the ramp down for her to facilitate her letting herself in. 

Comments

[twelve_not_fourteen]

A little more energy diverted to the peeling of the orange will yield some success. He's got it about half finished at the moment. He's becoming more confident in his ability to peel an orange, but when he realizes how much easier it is just to slice it with a knife into quarters, that will be the end.

"That sounds about right." Bored in class, but generally liked by his classmates is what he would have guessed for himself too, but he really doesn't have much of a frame of reference. "Going to the same building day after day would probably still inspire me to want to leave."

Han doesn't put it past himself to feel a certain amount of wanderlust no matter how his life might have been different.

[brave_heart_verity]

"Sometimes the best thing about school was the leaving," she admits. "Where I grew up, school followed us home. We'd have work we had to do and turn in the next day. But sometimes there were fun things. Sports teams or clubs to join."

She works a wedge of fruit free from her orange and carefully removes a seed with her thumbnail before she takes a bite. Her childhood is not a period of her life she thinks much about anymore. It sucked, and it doesn't get any better when she worries about it.

"No racing circuits for kids, though."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"I was a teenager." He says with a side long glance. Not entirely sure if she's making fun or not. Just seemed like a kind of offhanded joke more than anything and he takes it as such.

"16 years old in body and about a 160 years old in terms of heart."

Certainly, the pair of them have something to comserate over in terms of sucky childhoods. Successfully peeling his orange, he starts following suit in eating the way she does. He picks apart the segment, looks for the seed and then takes a bite himself.

[brave_heart_verity]

"Oh, that's okay then, you would have been old enough for a license." She doesn't know, those pod racers might be really young. She does know that without legal protections and oversight, some people make kids do horrible things, and his childhood sounds like it fits in that definition.

"You don't seem that old to me." But she's not really one to talk, is she?

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"I might have regressed since then, it's hard to say."

He was a decidedly serious child. Who thinks about running off to be in the military when they're still a pre-teen? It's not even like there were GI-Joe's to glamorize it where he comes from.

"In the maturity and heart part of it anyway." He muses as he chews on his orange. "All man otherwise."

[brave_heart_verity]

Kids dreamt of running away to places of safety and structure for centuries before little plastic army men came along. It's either the army or the circus.

And she's not rising to that bait or lowering her glance. Sorry, Han. "So all adult except when you're not? Sounds like a good system."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

A point well made. Still, he was serious and mouthy as a boy. Take our word for it.

Pity that he can't get a reaction from her. At least annoying women who won't take you up on advances can be amusing to him. It's like him to want to poke the badger once in a while. To make people react for the sake of it.

"You say system." He says with a smirk. That implies planning and forethought, which, is not exactly a trait associated with Han. It's more like sudden bursts of insight and non-linear thinking.

"I rarely make a far reaching plan or restrain myself to a set of rules."

[brave_heart_verity]

So was she, except for the 'boy' part. They would have been great friends or fabulous enemies.

He'll get a reaction out of her sometimes, she's not made of stone. But here she's been working so hard to not get annoyed by these things, thinking it'd make things easier between them. Boys are confusing.

She gives a little shrug, conceding the point. "A good way to live, then? To let yourself be what you want to be in a given moment? It sounds more fun than following all the rules, right up until people start shooting."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

It's him settling. If he cant get her to want to jump into his arms, some light teasing is better than nothing. What can we say, we all knew long before this moment that Han Solo was wired in a different way than most.

"Can I tell you a little secret?"

[brave_heart_verity]

Light teasing can be fun. It'll let them remain friends when he moves on to more obliging targets. Anyway, historically, she's a lousy girlfriend. He should be counting his blessings she's not inflicting that mess on him.

"Mm-hmm. Always." He has her full attention now.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

No comment. He hasn't really had a girlfriend, but one, though there have been a few flings. Something, something, insert a metaphor about two ships passing in the night here.

"Sometimes the shooting is the fun part."

In a sense. In some instances. It's not as if he doesn't regret the loss of life on some level, but, sometimes he needs to cheat death to truly feel alive.

[brave_heart_verity]

These things can take time. Better to wait for the right one, she thinks anyway.

She considers that, then admits, "I don't think you're the only one who feels that way. Maybe I will too, if I'm ever in that kind of situation."

Cheating death hasn't made her feel great so far. She doesn't have high hopes that it'll change. But something's got to give.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Well, she'll at least know that he means what he said. That in his eyes, it's the truth. Certainly, youth plays a part in this attitude too.

A Han Solo who had spent, even a few years, fighting the Empire and burying friends might have a different perspective.

"I guess that the thing we should hope for is not finding out."

[brave_heart_verity]

Sincerity is one of her favorite things, it's true. But she's learned to be cautious. Loki was charming and very sincere, and look where that got them...

"That would be the responsible thing, yeah. But if the choice is between being your friend and not finding out, I'm choosing you every time." Hell of a time for her to make eye contact again. Like she's being serious or something.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Hrm.

He finds himself looking for the subtext of what Verity says a lot more than with other people. Half the time he thinks he's reading too deeply into what she's trying to say. Putting meaning and feelings where they didn't belong. The rest of the time he feels like he's missing the point entirely.

"Well." He says, his brown eyes looking perhaps a bit softer than usual. "I can promise that you'll have someone watching your back who would hate the thought of a blaster pointed at you."

[brave_heart_verity]

She's had a lifetime of practice making herself hard to read. She can't blame him for finding her difficult. But she is trying to be clear.

"That makes all the difference." She gives him a smile, one of the ones she doesn't let out much in public. "And I suppose I don't actually have to kill someone to make them regret having met me. I've been doing that for years."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

She's pretty when she smiles. He would tell her so directly, but by his count, he feels like he might have hit a threshold on unsolicited compliments for the day; so instead he says, "I wish I could get you to smile more."

Make of that what you will, Ver.

As it is, he's gonna finish off this orange that's been getting warm in his hand. It's pretty good. He likes the tartness that accompanies the sweet.

[brave_heart_verity]

There's a point at which it starts getting a little weird, yeah. Especially for a girl so unused to compliments. She keeps smiling after the roundabout compliment, but it's a little sadder now. "I smile more now than I used to."

Now she's feeling a little self-conscious about it and a little guilty for smiling at all, considering what happened. But that's not a burden he's offered to share, so she'll save it for later, or (ugh) therapy.

At least the oranges are winning.

"So, are there any good stories about how you got all those guns?"

[twelve_not_fourteen]

So much insecurity around here. So many feelings.

On some level he's aware of the paradoxes that seem to surround him. The way he feels most alive when he's inches from death. A crowded bar will make him yern for the quiet of space. How his confidence shields him from his insecurities. The sweet of dessert counterbalanced with black coffee.

So the sense of a sadness behind a smile isn't entirely lost upon him, but this pilot does know, most of the time, when to let off the throttle. Now is a good time.

"All those guns." He says with a smile. "There's only four of them over there." There's about ten more stored in strategic places around the ship. You know, for reasons.

"Most of them we're acquired from persons who no longer needed them." And by that, he means taken off of bodies. Let's face it. Han doesn't have a lot of disposable income to buy things that he can often just pick up for free.

[brave_heart_verity]

She's relieved he's backing off. Some stories are better told in pieces. The sorrow will sink back into its place behind the other feelings in time.

"That's four times as many as I have, and twice as many as you have hands." This seems like a perfectly reasonable point to make, to her. But he might say something similar about 'all her books' and get the same kind of reaction. Sure, she can only read so many at a time, but she needs them. For reasons.

"Ah." She can guess what that means. "Generous of them."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"Maybe someday, when I've made the fortune I'm clearly destined to have, I'll be buying nice pieces." He says with a shrug. Then again, when you get really rich, you start buying the guys to hold the guns for you. There's also the outside chance, as small as it is, that maybe someday he won't need a gun within arms reach at all times.

"One time I did do a job where someone wanted me to run some blasters and they paid me with a crate of them, I turned around and sold most of those. I've also won two from draws." He feels like when it's one on one and you've beaten your opposition in a quickdraw, you've earned that gun.

"You can buy them pretty cheap in certain markets if you know where to look."

[brave_heart_verity]

"The fancy ones, or the reliable ones?" She knows enough to know they won't always coincide.

"Draws?" C'mon, Han, she's not a gun person. Now there need to be explanations. Everyone knows he hates having to sound smart and be the expert on things.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"Ones that are of good quality." He says without hesitation. "I don't think I could ever be the kind of guy who buys ornate weapons."

He just went to bed hungry too many times to blow a lot of credits on something meant to keep on display.

"They don't happen very often, but, sometimes people will use them to settle a dispute. Two men with guns stand a certain distance apart and when someone indicates it's time to draw, they shoot at each other."

[brave_heart_verity]

"And here I thought you liked pretty things." That was teasing again. The clue is in the way the corner of her mouth quirks up when she's talking. When she thinks it's particularly funny, her eyes crinkle up slightly.

"Oh, like cowboys." There's that reference again. "I didn't figure you meant a raffle, but, you never know."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

He knows that was to make fun and she got him pretty good. He knows he's called her that a few times already, but has been hesitant to offer any compliments of greater substance because they so easily and throughly get her out of her comfort zone. To call someone pretty is fairly benign.

"This Captain gets busy." He says, after a few moments of trying to come up with the right response. "I can't stop to chase every pretty thing I see. I have to find the things that are worthy of my attention."

He's pretty pleased at himself for arriving at that reply.

As for cowboy, yeah, he' noticed that whatever they are, he seems to have things in common with them. They don't have cows where he comes from, though, ranching exists in it's equivalences out there. At minimum, pistol duels of speed are stupid and dangerous; an older Han would know better not to let it come to that if he had any say in it.

"No. None of them were door prizes or party favors either."