Good Morning Mandalore: Every Day Is An Open Door

[LE-03 (Leigh)]

Leigh made her hologram quirk its mouth back at Na'an. "I will not pretend to understand how you can be comfortable waiting, but I am sure Adelle appreciates the sentiment...although the fact that she is in that state at all concerns me. Normally, you are the only one on this ship that sweats so much."

Leigh's thoughts turned to match her projected eyes, to the door where the third member of their crew had been only moments ago.

Adelle Bastiel was an...interesting creature. The Healer and the droid had struck up a sort of friendship during their time together three years ago, even before her partnership with Na'an was fully established. They had even worked together intimately, to essentially put Na'an back together into something resembling a person. Out of anyone in the galaxy, Adelle probably understood both of them the best--maybe better than they understood each other, in some ways. She had a...way of making them talk.
Even so, Leigh had never been quite able to comprehend why she had decided to join them in leaving the Jedi. If anything, the problem had lingered in her processors almost as irritatingly as some of the questions Na'an had posed in their early years. Adelle had had everything, had she not? A burgeoning career, respect from her superiors, even a growing support network for the darkness inside her she never seemed to be able to shake. She seemed comfortable here, but still...why give it all up, when Na'an and Leigh's own reasons for leaving the Jedi were so personal they could barely even be said to touch her? Why live on this tiny ship, with only perfunctory visits to the planets she knew, the people she loved, far away from the places that only barely kept away the nightmares she was still trying to hide?

Why? Why?

It made no logical sense.



But then, Leigh should be used to organic beings making no sense. Just look at who she lived with.

"You should check on her. Use my complaints as an excuse," she said simply, and turned to the terminal, keeping one ear open for Na'an's reply. With her non-cannon arm, she set to the work of opening the comm channels through a public call sign.

::Hawk to Mandalore ground control. Requesting permission for landing in your trade sector rather than in the tourist ports. We wish to apply for licensure, and have product to back it. Over.::


[member="Kaine Australis"], [member="Yasha Mantis"], [member="Vidalu Na'an"], [member="Adelle Bastiel"]

 

[Adelle Bastiel]

There was only so much she could do. Adelle cranked the water up to Mustafarian levels of scalding and stepped underneath the cascade. She hissed at the pain, but the pain brought clarity with it and shattered the fugue state that had fogged her mind. Water stung her scalp as she leaned back, wetting her hair before lathering in the shampoo. The nightmares needed to be controlled, that much she knew. But she lacked her usual inventory of sedatives and there wasn't room on this freighter of Na'an's—or Noba's, rather—for a sparring match. Na'an's domination of the training room had already been well established by the time Adelle joined the ship. Wouldn't have mattered anyways: no treadmill, no matter how fancy, could throw enough obstacles at her to push her limits.

Felucia's jungles had spoiled her.

Adelle ran her hands through her hair, finishing the hair care before taking a cloth and scrubbing at her body violently like she was ashamed of her own skin. The other matter, and the one she had no real answer for, remained confusingly difficult to sort out: the matter of Na'an. Or, rather, moments around Na'an. Like five minutes ago in the cockpit. Adelle swore she could still feel the heat from the other woman's hand where it had touched her shoulder. Not to mention the way her damp clothes had clung, showing a lithe, fighter's figure. Adelle scrubbed her shoulder furiously. No. Attachments were messy affairs, at least in her case. To say that almost every relationship of any kind she'd ever had ended poorly would be an understatement. She joined Na'an and Leigh for their competency, not to grow attached. Well . . . not really grow attached. They both deserved a better life than what they'd been dealt and they were trying to do better than they had. Adelle felt more fondness for them than perhaps was safe.

She flung the washcloth at the wall and knotted her hands in her hair. Things could never be simple, could they?

Breathe. Just breathe.

[member="LE-03 (Leigh)"] [member="Vidalu Na'an"]

 

[Vidalu Na'an]

Na'an sat up, considering her partner's seemingly out-of-the-blue request. The fact that Adelle Bastiel got, at best, two or three hours of sleep a night was unspoken common knowledge between the three of them, and the sight of her awake hours before even a Jedi's normal rising were as common as the dark circles almost perpetually under her eyes. The sweat, however, was a considerably less frequent occurrence. She slid out of the seat and back onto her feet to pat the droid's dome affectionately.

"You know she'll never tell me anything, right?" she said, not without affection. "But you're right. I'll trust you to get us planetside."

With that, she loped easily out of the cockpit and towards the refresher, only stopping at her quarters to remove her shoes and grab a change of clothes. There was no point in putting on her old smelly shirt over freshly showered skin, right? Leigh would be furious if she showed up for trade negotiations like that.

Although Adelle seemed to have forgotten. Na'an noted the pile--and the lack of a clean set to match it--on the floor as she sidled into the refresher, squinting through the steam. The Healer had turned up the heat again, filling the room with so much warmth and moisture that the air felt more like soup. Na'an liked heat, but gods, how could Adelle stand thirty solid minutes of this much humidity without feeling like she was about to suffocate?

"Oi, Doc!" she said loudly, all but announcing herself. "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there's no time for luxuries. Leigh wants us both washed up so we don't embarrass ourselves with the licensing office."

She sat on the closed toilet, clean clothes in her lap, and waited her turn to get a good look at her friend. Leigh's judgement was usually better than most humans, but Adelle Bastiel she still looked rough even after a shower, then they had something to worry about.

With that, she loped easily out of the cockpit and towards the refresher, only stopping at her quarters to remove her shoes and grab a change of clothes.

 

[Adelle Bastiel]

Breathe. Adelle inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the warm, humid air. Eyes closed, she kept her fingertips on the shower wall for grounding, trying to use her senses to keep her in the present while her mind dealt with the past. Machines in her head. Wires under her skin. Breathe. A red twi'lek's face melting off in a permanent scream. Her hand on the wall tightened into a fist. Smoke in her eyes. Screams in her ears. A voice, deep and suave and sinister. She exhaled shakily, forcing herself to endure the memnii. She had to get used to them, somehow. "Your fault." The voice snickered. Krayt. "You were the trigger. They died because of you."

"Oi, Doc!"

Adelle wheeled and slammed her fist into the shower door, before her brain recognized Na'an's voice. Anger soon overtook relief as adrenaline flooded her veins. She couldn't hear the rest of what Na'an said over the pounding in her ears.

"Knock first!" she snarled. She ran her hands through her hair, sloshing water back as she tried to still the trembling. Her breathing became painfully slow as she tried to force her heart rate back down to a normal level. The scalding water now felt more like an annoyance than a relief and the knuckles on her hand complained about hitting a solid transparisteel door. She slammed the water off and threw open the shower door, yanking a towel off its hook on the wall. Adelle dried off where she stood, too angry and too scared to care that she was in full view of Na'an. Didn't Na'an realize she had issues with PTSD? Did Na'an even care?

Adelle saw the clean clothes in Na'an's lap. And realized she hadn't brought any with her.

"Kriff," she said.

 

[Vidalu Na'an]

If there was one thing for sure Na'an had learned about dealing with [member="Adelle Bastiel"], it was the value of stillness. It was like greeting an easily-startled animal in the wild, where any sudden movement would send them running. She held her body rigid, her hands clearly visible in her lap even through the steam, working to keep her face open. If Adelle read anything in her expression that she could even remotely translate as fear or upset, it'd set her off even more. Na'an could already see she was all but vibrating with whatever was on her mind--it was shaking the water off her limbs almost as much as the towel was drying them off.
"I tried announcing myself," she said simply. "Leigh doesn't want me greeting trade officials smelling like a training room locker. "

Her fingers twisted into the top layer of the tunic in her lap. "And I...Leigh was worried about you."

 

[Adelle Bastiel]

Adelle snorted and tossed the towel onto her head to start drying her hair, her muscles relaxing as the flood of adrenaline drained from her blood. The relief was sickening. "Leigh worries too much."

Under normal circumstances, she might have been embarrassed that all her scars and the tattoos she couldn't remember were visible. They typically invited questions from those that saw them—doctors, lovers, the like, mostly benign but invasive all the same. As it was, she didn't fully care that Na'an could see the scars from fighting rings in her lost days on Coruscant, or the pinpoints where the torture device masquerading as a suit of combat armor had anchored into her skin, or even the krayt dragon on her lower back that marked her as property of someone else. Her sleep-deprivation induced headache and the slowly sickening feeling of relief saw to that. She paused drying and pinched the bridge of her nose before rubbing her fingertips over the center of her forehead. Force, she felt terrible.

"It was just a bad dream," she said, continuing to dry off. "I'll get over it." Eventually.

Internally, she cursed herself. Why couldn't she just get over events that happened three and a half years ago? More than that, why hadn't she remembered to bring her clothes? The ship's hallways were going to be freezing. Still, it was that or continue a conversation they'd had many times before. And she wasn't so sure she could go toe-to-toe with Na'an at the moment. Adelle nodded over her shoulder at the shower. "It's all yours."

 

[Vidalu Na'an]

"...Right."
So it was this line again. Na'an kept her face carefully blank as she reached down to peel off her boots--too blank, to anyone paying full attention. [member="Adelle Bastiel"] had always kept her secrets close to the chest, even back when Na'an was her patient instead of her crewmate. There had always been hints, of course. The nightmares, for one; all those marks for another. Even if Na'an discounted the scars, which considering her own was no option at all, there was still the tattoo.

That tattoo. Na'an had first caught sight of it entirely by accident during a spar--a strip of fierce-faced skin Adelle neither seemed intent on hiding, or open to discussing. Although Leigh had never found definitive proof linking the krayt dragon to any slave organization currently operating, the Healer wasn't the type to get a tattoo like that by choice.

The boots were off, exposing Na'an's feet to the warm floor as she stood and left the pile of clothes on the toilet seat. Her toes seemed to slide across the tiling as she made her way into the open refresher, still carefully blank.

It was normal for people with marks like that to have a few secrets. To be reticent, even with their closest companions. Some scars were never easy to expose, and Adelle had a right to keep them under wraps. As far as she knew, even those in the old Order hadn't been privy to Adelle Bastiel's hidden thoughts. Not her fellow Healers, not the children in her care, not even the Master. Na'an and Leigh were no different that way, in being kept in the dark. No matter how long the three of them travelled together, she had no obligation to tell them anything.

Still.

"You know, there's one good thing about having left the Jedi," she said blandly. Without looking at Adelle, she pulled the tie out of her hair, fluffing at it as it fell in sweaty clumps across her neck. "I don't have to feel guilty for telling you that that kind of response is starting to piss me off."

With that, she peeled off her own shirt and threw it out of the refresher; it landed at Adelle's feet as if making a statement of its own. She then closed the door with a click that was only slightly more aggressive than normal. "Get dressed before you leave. They should fit okay if you don't belt the shirt."

 

[Adelle Bastiel]

Na'an's response grated her already frayed mind.

"I'd think you'd be used to it by now," she said, biting out her words. The shirt fell at her feet and she eyed it like an insult then glowered at the 'fresher door. She kicked the offending article aside and finished drying off her feet. Jedi though she was, she had her limits and Na'an had reached them. Adelle wrapped the towel around her tightly.

"I'll be fine." She just barely managed to keep the snarl out of her voice. "Worry about yourself."

Adelle turned on her heel and stalked out of the refresher, though the icy corridors to her room. Kriff it all.