Private The Hitchhiker

[Trextan Voidstalker]

Kyra Perl

"So what did you get for a new ship?"

The question arrived without any context and in the place of a normal hello. After a very brief conversation near Coren, they had agreed to catch up at a nearby cafe. He had arrived after her and she already had a table.

Trextan had not seen Kyra since the incident with the slavers. He hadn't been able to tow her ship away in one piece. He had incorrectly assumed that she had another one by now. He was quite remarkably capable of putting his foot in his mouth.

Trextan sat down on the other side of the table from Kyra. He slid a piece of flimsiplast over to himself with the menu.

"Ordered anything yet?" he asked

 

[Kyra Perl]

Kyra scowled into the bottom of her half-drained milkshake.

"Nothing." And it bothered her every day! Maybe if she hadn't blown that settlement nest egg she had won as teen, she'd have the funds to buy a new ship now. As it stood... "My father believes this was a lesson for me. I don't see why I'm being punished. We helped those people out."

Air sucked nosily through the bottom of her straw. She pushed away the empty glass and sighed into her crossed arms.

"No. I waited for you. ...Mostly," she clarified, as a plate of fried potatoes was placed between them.

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

Trextan was almost always hungry. He didn't have the best manners - having been raised in war by both Sith and Jedi - and grabbed some chips with his bare hand and shoved one into his mouth without waiting for it to cool.

"That seems unfair!" Trextan declared, immediately sympathetic.

It was obvious that he was struggling to chew the piping hot potato and talk at the same time. He was stubbornly refusing to stop either thing.

"It was mostly you who saved them too," Trextan said. "I wouldn't have turned up if the beacon hadn't gone off."

 

[Kyra Perl]

Kyra snorted in agreement.

There was, of course, two sides to every story and it did not serve her interests to tell the other one. Never mind that she was an adult in her own right, with no job and no purpose other than to bum on her father's ships. Coren's guilt over his early absence in her life had started to run dry... He had started to really step into the roll of dad now.

She blamed the birth of the twins.

"Yeah, well. He has me working for him. So I get to use them when I'm here, at least. ... I guess you've heard what he's doing here."

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

"Sort of," Trextan admitted.

That he did not reach for another fried potato was telling. So was his order for one beer and one glass of water. He wasn't about to admit that he had probably just burned his mouth.

"My dad fought with him during the war and I'm always..."

Trextan had his own complicated relationship with his father. He had been trained in the sith academy to kill Jacen. Eventually he had fought in the war for him. Somewhere along the line, Trextan had realised that it hadn't been his war to behin with.

"...I just want to be careful that I'm not getting mixed up in something that I'm not fully behind," he explained.

 

[Kyra Perl]

"My dad isn't looking for fights, Trextan." Behind the blunt words was a sympathetic grimace, the empath reading between the lines in his forehead.

"Besides," She popped a hot potato bite in her mouth and talked around the burning steam. "He loves those damn ships too much to scuff them up."

The jest was covered by the waiter's arrival. She shook her glass in a wordless request to order a second, then pointed to a picture of something smothered and covered in a brown gravy.

"Still, you came."
Trextan Voidstalker

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

"No, no I didn't get that impression," he said, with a hint of an apologetic tone.

He smiled at the joke.

"It's nice that he's trying to do some good things," Trextan continued. It surprised him how easily she saw into the heart of his concerns.

Trextan asked for a simple nerf burger and let his gaze fall accusingly upon the fries. Maybe they were cool enough now?

"I did," he said. "Chloe showed taught me about being a Warden, but I probably would have come if you or Coren had reached out too. I need to give dad a call too actually. I think the betrayal that brought down the Alliance Jedi broke him a little bit, but I know some day he'll have to interfere again."

He laughed, shook his head and reached for a fry.

"So what you been up to other than borrowing ships and flying them very, very carefully?" he asked.

 

[Kyra Perl]

Name a person the jedi hadn't broken and Kyra would give you a credit.

"So what you been up to other than borrowing ships and flying them very, very carefully?" he asked.

She leveled him a hard look and tossed a potato. "They shot me." And still, she wasn't living it down! She shook her head at him in mock indignation, then let it all go.

"Honestly? Not much. Hard to go much of anywhere without a ship. Dad keeps me busy but it's all grub work. 'Think he's trying to bore me into going back to school or something. Like that's going to happen."

Trextan Voidstalker

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

"You strike me as far too free spirited to go back to an academy," Trextan said. He grinned at her, but then pulled it back a notch. He feared that maybe the comment was too much of an assumption.

"If you had credits and a free week where would you go?" Trextan asked.

Again, there was a slightly awkward twist of his expression as he feared asking a question that was too personal.

 

[Kyra Perl]

Kyra blinked, her lips parting as she strained for an answer. The waiter placed the milkshake down in front of her. She bought herself time with the straw.

"I dunno," she confessed. "Anywhere? No where? What does it matter, I don't have the ship." Or the funds. Or the fuel. Or really anyone to go to. That hadn't bothered her before.

She shoved a frown away and picked what she felt would be a poignant redirection. "When are you gonna visit your dad."

Trextan Voidstalker

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

Trextan might have brought things back around to the question, but her own question swerved them down quite a different path.

"I think soon," Trextan said. "We've got..."

He paused for a moment and frowned. Very few people really knew why the relationship was complicated with his father. Choli and Chloe were perhaps the only ones.

"I could...explain why we've got to a better place by saying how we got here. But...it's maybe a bit heavy for a cafe catch up?" he said.

She would feel an echo of the pain. Darker memories of the sith academy and old resentment towards his father.

Trextan offered her an out. She could avoid going there in the conversation if she wanted to.

 

[Kyra Perl]

Her spine stiffened, her whole core tightening around itself as pain-- she jerked the straw out of her mouth and took a mental step back. "Yeah, uh. Right. Um." She regretted her intrusion almost instantly. Her cheeks filled with heat as she looked down to the table.

"Sorry."

She really needed to get a handle on that.

"So, um. I never really did thank you. For helping before..."

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

"Don't need to be sorry," Trextan said with a slow nod. "No trouble done, just fair warning is all."

He probably did not need to get into his mother dying in an Alliance attack with Kyra.

"No you didn't," he laughed. "But it's alright, we were a bit busy trying not to be...unalived. You can get the tab to say thanks."

"I think you did good going down there to help those people. Pretty ballsy...pretty brave doing that on your own."

 

[Kyra Perl]

"Wasn't really like that," She dismissed, making space for her plate as it was put down. "I didn't even know what I was running into. I mean don't get me wrong, I would have helped anyway, but my ship crashed and then I was nearly captured myself."

She mixed up the mash on her plate and released the steam into the air. "-You're the one that came down for me. What had you that deep in sith space, anyway?" She raised a curious brow up at him.

 

[Trextan Voidstalker]

He offered a shrug. Trextan clearly wasn't comfortable in taking any of the praise for what they had done.

"We did good," he said firmly.

His burger was brought out, but Trextan left it to cool so he could talk.

"It wasn't for the Sith, that's for sure," Trextan replied. He tried to keep out of such matters. "There was a freight station that had trouble with an infestation of Ilkha. Nasty little things chew through cables - and arms. I helped clear it out."

His attention turned to food quite quickly. He leaned over the table to avoid spilling lettuce and burger relish on himself and took an unnecessarily large bite.