The Park, Friday Morning

[suitably_heroic]

The medic had freed Atton from his kolto bath again on Thursday morning. Another full day of observation, and he was good to go, with a bunch of patches in his pocket and an abdomen that still hurt if he bent the wrong way.

And then Mical had put him on the Ebon Hawk and sent him back to Fandom. (The Hawk was to make a point: stay there, don't come back. Otherwise Mical would've just kicked him through a portal.)

He wasn't planning to stay there. Not for long. Not with Mira out there, dealing with this problem that Atton was beginning to suspect was bigger than they'd anticipated.

He didn't bother to go back to the apartment - he didn't want to run the risk of running into Sparkle just yet - but stumbled down the stairs and walked down to the park.

That alone was probably more exercise than he should've given himself. He winced at the sound of his own breath as he sank down on a bench.

Space.

[[ open! ]]

Comments

[suitably_heroic]

Let he who be without sin...

Atton snorted. "No," he said. "Still the easiest way to make a few credits on Ryloth, from what I hear."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan's jaw tightened so hard he was half expecting his teeth to crack. "Are these the Hutt things I've heard about? Or is it more widespread than them?"

[suitably_heroic]

"Hutts, other criminals, other Twi'leks..."

Atton shrugged, and reached into his jacket to root around for a packet of cigarettes.

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan made a mental note to bring spare thermal clips if he went on a milk run with Kanan and Hera. Kanan liked to take potshots at troopers, but Kaidan had nothing against them. Slavers? Slavers the cosmos could do without.

"Four thousand years," Kaidan said, thinking aloud, "Between you and them, and that shit's still going on."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton found the pack and pulled out a cigarette. "My universe likes to do things in cycles, unfortunately," he said, "Our bad habits are hard to break."

[spectre_alenko]

"Oh? Other than slavers, and Hutt who I've been told are just generally bad news all around, are there other bad habits I should know about?" he asked.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he muttered, "Goddamnit.. her people were slave-raided for thousands of years."

[suitably_heroic]

"Gambling, corruption, a big religious war every century or so," Atton said, waving for a moment.

He stuck the cigarette between his lips and lit it.

"One big cesspool of misery and violence, that's home."

[spectre_alenko]

"What are the Jedi up to, in your time?" Kaidan asked, "I keep getting the impression they're some sort of warrior monk police force, but this.. this is a whole lot of time for crap to stew."

Without the Jedi squashing it.

[suitably_heroic]

"The Jedi work for the Republic in most time periods," Atton said, "And the Republic's not putting a great deal of effort into fixing it, I guess."

A beat.

"We just had a little war that set most of the Republic on fire and killed off the entire Jedi Order, so don't look at me over this one."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan processed that. Atton was from thousands of years prior to Kanan. This wasn't the same purge; it couldn't be.

"The Republic sounds like a real piece of work, I can almost see why someone would firebomb it. Sounds like it rebuilds, though. Cyclical, like you say."

Not a good cycle, no. Republic builds up, Jedi Order builds up and aligns with them, and somehow they manage to piss off enough people in their galaxy that they periodically got nuked back to nearly nothing. That didn't bode well for their governance.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton breathed out a big plume of smoke and leaned back, ignoring the twinge in his gut as he did so.

"My Republic wasn't fast enough to act when the Mandalorians rolled in," he said lightly. "When they did jump into action, the army was outnumbered and outflanked, and the Jedi were so scared after the last war that they decided to stay out of it and left us to die."

[spectre_alenko]

"Mandalorians," Kaidan turned the word over, "The ones with the armor the troopers ripped off. They were the aggressors, in your time? And the badass, plasma-sword wielding space wizards ..sat it out."

Yeah, the Jedi weren't really winning any points here.

"So much for 'there is no chaos, there is harmony', I guess."

[suitably_heroic]

"They were trying to be harmonious, and just wound up letting the Mandalorians light a fire in our homes," Atton said. He snorted. "But they didn't all take it laying down. This Jedi called Revan rebelled against the Order. He took a bunch of young knights and Padawan with him and took control of the Republican Army. Saved it."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan processed that as well, "How do you go from 'saved the Republic' to 'and then it all burned and the Jedi were wiped out'?"

'Our'. Interesting.

[suitably_heroic]

"War weighs heavily on most people, and worse on the Jedi," Atton said. He shrugged, eyeing the tip of his cigarette for a while. "Revan got sick of the way things were going. So he crushed the Mandalorian forces and then took the entire Republic army and his wing of Jedi into the Unknown Regions. Well, the entire wing but one, I mean."

He brought the cigarette back up.

"When he came back, he went to war against everyone who had abandoned the people of the Republic. The Republic government, and the Jedi."

[spectre_alenko]

"Is 'Unknown Regions' a term for 'area outside the galactic core', or do you mean dark space?" Kaidan asked, tilting his head a little.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton made an amused noise. "Right, you don't know the basics," he said. "Our galaxy's divided up in a few sectors, roughly speaking. Deep Core, Core, Inner Rim, Expanse, Mid Rim, Outer Rim... and somewhere beyond the Outer Rim, the Unknown Regions."

Beat.

"We don't know what's there, hence, Unknown. We're not always great at naming things."

[spectre_alenko]

"Not of your galaxy, no," Kaidan agreed, "That's why I'm asking all the questions about it. In ours, there's the Galactic Core, and named areas of space, but there's also dark space, which exists alongside the galaxies in a starless expanse. It's..not a good place, and most races can't access it." He wasn't sure how to explain it. Scientists had tried, he just wasn't on their level. As far as he was concerned, 'dark space' was 'here there be Reapers'.

"So he took off to the great unknown, then came back and ..cleaned house?"

[suitably_heroic]

"That's one way of putting it," Atton said. "He either killed or converted a large portion of the Jedi before they managed to capture him, mindwiped him and sent him back to dismantle his own empire."

[spectre_alenko]

Converted. That word.. "He ..went..Sith?" Kaidan asked, groping for the terminology.

[suitably_heroic]

"That's what his army called themselves after they came back, at least," Atton said lightly, with the voice of a man just recounting history.

[spectre_alenko]

Yeah, that wasn't going to fly. Kaidan hadn't heard anyone from Atton's galaxy talk lightly when referring to the Sith. However, when a war veteran takes that tone.. you don't push it. He had no doubt Atton had been involved - if your home's on fire and you do nothing, you die. Atton wasn't dead.

"Is that where it started? The use of the word to mean 'Jedi gone dark'?" Kaidan asked, and explained, "I've only ever heard it used in that context, but sometimes it sounds like it has a different meaning."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton frowned. "No," he said, "That word was already in use back when Exar Kun started the war before all of this happened. Turned from the Jedi and declared himself Dark Lord of the Sith. And I'm pretty sure he had some old Sith Lord rattling around his brain. Mical'd know more."

[spectre_alenko]

"'The war'?" Kaidan asked.

You guys had so many, it was hard to keep them straight, really.

[suitably_heroic]

"Yeah, the war before the Mandalorian War," Atton said, waving, since clearly the 'before all of this happened' hadn't landed right. "The one that scared the robes off of the Jedi. We had a few decades of peace after that, it was nice."