fandomtownies | Galactica Point, Sunday Morning

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Galactica Point, Sunday Morning

You know, there was a lot of stuff about this place Atton remembered - vividly. Spending two years here, working out who 'Atton Rand' was going to be. Spending more years here, breaking back out of his shell, putting his head back on right, figuring out things like how to have friends without putting miles of emotional distance between you. Deciding to pack up and leave after Sparkle vanished down the penal system and Mira died and Visas told him, in the throes of a vision, that he'd be the last to die.

Last part kind of wrecked the middle part, but not in the same way it'd been wrecked before. He was okay with it now, the distance. Funny, he'd always fought to get rid of the traditional Jedi crap about attachment, but he'd wound up the one content with a traditional Jedi life.

He remembered other stuff, too. Smaller things.

Which was why in the morning he took the old walk from his apartment to Chilly Boulder and then down to the water, here. Stared out at the horizon, let his brain wander back down memory lane just this once, and opened up the floodgates to old, now-nostalgic melancholy.

He took a bite of his ice cream, lost in thought-- and pulled a face. "Okay," he muttered, "So I still hate soft serve. Good to know."

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"Thought I might find you here."

Really, there were only so many places for Sparkle to check out when looking for Atton. He wasn't a teacher anymore, so odds were low he'd be in his office. He'd tried Atton's apartment instead; no dice, and since odds were high that this was one of those weekends he'd even taken a few minutes to stock the fridge. Then he'd glanced into the Perk on a quick jog by it just in case, before continuing on down to the water.

He nodded to the ice cream.

"Thought you hated that shit."

"I do," Atton said.

And just to underscore that fact, he chucked it, albeit reluctantly, out over the wall. "It just melts and gets everywhere, ugh. Who even came up with that?"

"Someone who looked at milk one day and said to themselves, 'I think this would be much improved if we could find a way to stack it,'" Sparkle theorized, smirking a little to himself. "You can get it in a cup, you know. Less messy, anyway, if you keep insisting on putting it in your mouth."

"Nah," Atton said, leaning his arms on the wall. "It wouldn't have the same nostalgia value."

"Yeah, it doesn't have that same wet splat when you inevitably throw the soggy cone on the ground," Sparkle noted, miming the incoming trajectory of a flying ice cream with one hand, and then making a 'thuph' sound with his lips as it came into contact with hand number two, the ground. "So, that's what you're out here looking for today, is it? Nostalgia?"

Atton shot him a glance. "Isn't that why anybody shows up to their high school reunion?" he asked. "Roll around in the past a couple of times, then go home?"

"Sure, yeah," Sparkle agreed, shrugging. Considering he'd pretty much gone out of his way to avoid every reunion type thing the school had put on since things went to hell at the home, he didn't sound completely certain, though. "Or, I don't know, get back in touch with people. Pick up where you left off. Make new connections. People around here tend to be the kind of people worth knowing, if they made it this far after graduating."

Tended to be. There were some exceptions, naturally.

Sparkle had always sort of prided himself on his ability to be an exception.

Atton let out a snort. "Well, that was the theory," he said. "The reality is nobody ever really gets to pick up where they left off."

He'd learned that one early and well, and okay, maybe this place incited too much melancholy for the let's-talk-about-the-weather dance right now.

"But hey, maybe Cade'll let you tag along on his bounty hunting biz for a while if you ask nicely."

"Yeah, maybe," Sparkle replied. "Then again, I'm the kind of guy people are likely to take a bounty out on in the first place. I don't see that ending well, either."

He pursed his lips for a moment.

"The island threw us back to 2015, did you notice?"

It had been kind of hard to miss, granted. Nothing here had changed with the exception of the vast majority of the people, and Sparkle was familiar with that sort of weirdness already from the opposite end. Good old Fandom.

"Then pull a Mira and try to turn yourself in for the credits," Atton said. Stupid; that whole I-probably-have-a-bounty-on-me line always took him back to that one.

"And yeah, I noticed. Apparently it's happened before, but I don't think I was around for it at the time."

Maybe he'd been dead in that alternate future. You know, the way the story had been supposed to go.

... Don't give him ideas, Atton. Sparkle actually looked briefly thoughtful at that one for a second, trying to puzzle out how to make that one work in his favour.

Shut up.

"Yeah," he said after a moment, shrugging it off, "last time it happened, Alec and I wound up shouting one another down. Different reality, same prison time, took a complete left turn and tried to clean my act up afterwards. Apparently with a Shadowhunter."

Because he thrived on stupid decisions, apparently.

"Kind of makes you think. Plenty of ways it could have went."

And here, for that stupid kid that would be left in his place once he went back to wherever it was he was going, none of those ways were set in stone yet. He hadn't gotten there. Hadn't made those idiot decisions.

Had he ever even told Sparkle about Mira? He might've. That'd been the early days, back when his head was enough of a mess he hadn't been sure what to feel about the whole Sparkle-winding-up-in-prison thing.

"Think I might've been dead the first time, actually," Atton mused. "Or just my regular idiot self. Whatever."

Conversations like this kind of made him wish he'd kept up with the old smoking habit.

"Maybe it's the island's idea of therapy," he said. "You know, here, this is all the ways you could've fucked up. Don't do it."

Sparkle's lips pursed a little at that, thoughtfully.

"So, what's this for you, then? The island cutting you some slack since the last go-round didn't work out so well?"

Yeah. He wasn't even denying that he'd fucked up. That maybe he still was. It wasn't like he didn't know right from wrong, wasn't like he didn't know that he was a criminal, doing criminal things. And the whole 'I can quit any time' line was true enough, as cliché as it was.

"Moderate amount of slack," Atton agreed. "I mean, I don't remember fucking up any time recently, and the galaxy hasn't been quite as on fire as it used to be, so I'm doing okay."

Largely alone, unless you counted Her Grand Masterliness Brianna, but okay. At least he wasn't wandering the galaxy with a constant and confusing bleed of mixed emotions making him act like an erratic moron anymore.

"Good." Sparkle took a seat, looking out at the water. "Whatever the hell else is completely fucked up, I'm glad you're doing okay."

Which maybe wasn't his place to say, or maybe didn't matter a hell of a lot even if it was.

Sparkle didn't care.

Not caring wasn't a bad way to approach things, he found. It made it easier for him to keep talking, now.

"I don't want that kid I was to end up here, you know. Much as I tell myself I'm okay, and let's face it, by my own standards I sure as hell am, he can do better than I did."

Edited 2015-05-17 13:51 (UTC)

"He can," Atton agreed. "I mean, I was never Team Sparkle's Going To Be A Michelin Cook, but blatantly and actively getting your ass thrown in a jail? That's above and beyond."

He shot Sparkle another look.

"Especially without asking someone to come up with a plan to bust you out."

There it went again, the corner of Sparkle's mouth twitching just a tiny bit.

"I needed to see the trial through," he said, simply. "If Raine wound up getting in shit because of all of that, I never would have forgiven myself. She deserved a second chance, and the multiverse wouldn't have been kind to her."

Raine had been... strong, in a way he hadn't seen much of in Toronto. And fragile in a way that he'd seen all too often. He'd needed to give her closure. And to keep her safe. And to let her set out in the world she knew, finally understanding that it was a fucked-up, cruel place.

"Everything just sort of snowballed from there."

"Which is why you needed a plan," Atton said. "Get yourself that conviction, but squeak out before they can actually take you to prison. Settle down in the next universe and start a ramen cart, or whatever it is you food people do."

He leaned back against the wall and shrugged. "Running would've made you look even guiltier, so that'd help."

Edited 2015-05-17 14:15 (UTC)

Let's face it. Sparkle would have run the most fabulous of ramen carts.

"Yeah," he agreed. "It would have really nailed down that I was a good-for-nothing punk who didn't stand a chance of proper rehabilitation, all while making them chase wild geese."

And hell, the thought that they were still somewhere in his reality looking for him now amused the hell out of him. He would have gotten a kick out of it at nineteen.

"I never said I was smart about it. Just that I stand by why I did it."

Atton would have happily had a bowl at Sparkle's ramen cart. Especially if he swung it by the Temple. Bet the Coruscanti would've loved the weird extra-dimensional food.

"Why you did it only means so much," he said lightly. "Especially since you took all that emphatic fervor and threw it out the window somewhere along the line. You went from being a 19-year-old with a savior complex to a scumbag running cons. I'd say 'nice work' if it didn't sound so stupidly familiar."

Well, beyond the part where Atton had already been well on his way to being Sith at 19, but still.

"Being a chameleon didn't work out too well. Snakes live longer."

There was a slightly sour note in that, though it was directed mostly inward. He was a snake with a code of honour, at least within his own worldview. But then, most snakes were. Just so long as they drew a line in the sand and didn't cross it, they could go on in life confident that they were still well within their own arbitrary limit of what was deemed acceptable.

"Probably doesn't mean much. The kid's about as likely to remember this conversation come the end of the weekend as I am to turn around and change my stripes once I get back to where I'm going. He was offered a lawyer by someone who will remember this weekend once it's over, though."

By another snake, granted. And one that Atton had never approved of. But Sparkle well understood where Hannibal's own line was drawn, by now. Snakes didn't always bite simply because they could.

"You know. For what it's worth."

Maybe snakes didn't, no. But the moment you convinced yourself you knew where a snake's boundaries lay was the moment you were setting yourself up to get bitten.

Atton'd say that was part of the reason why he'd largely avoided Sparkle, but he'd be lying.

He could be a much bigger, badder, deadlier predator than a snake if he didn't watch himself. One brief backstep into the dark side fifteen years ago had proven that.

"To me, not much," he said. "To you and me twenty years ago, maybe something. I don't know. I try to stay away from what-ifs when the island isn't throwing them at my head."

"Not a bad way to be, I guess." Sparkle shrugged. "I'm okay with being a what-if, though. If none of this ever happens, sure. We'll see what else there is the next time around."

He picked up a pebble. Turned it over in his hands a few times. Flung it out toward the water. And then did it again.

"You want me to stop this? Striking up conversations, showing up to these things, whatever? Would that make it easier?"

Atton let out a snort. "I'm not a messy twenty-something anymore, Sparks," he said, "If you talk to me and I don't want to talk to you, I'll pick an exit and start walking."

As opposed to doing something bizarre and stupid the way he used to.

"What makes me curious this particular weekend is the fact you keep trying."

Sparkle huffed a soft 'heh,' at that. It wasn't really like he'd gotten to know Atton all that well since he'd been a messy twenty-something, really.

"Maybe it's some of that nostalgia you keep talking about."

Sparkle had loved him. Not that messy, ugly love the way he'd felt for Lewis - the kind that didn't stand a chance in hell of ever ending any way but badly. The other sort. He'd loved Atton the way he remembered loving his sister, back before they'd been separated. And it had been obvious, to look back on it now. Of course he did.

But god, like hell he'd ever done much admitting it.

And then, because it seemed appropriate enough, he mimed out the ice cream hitting the ground again, complete with sound effect.

Thupp.

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