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]

"And then you overshot into therapist," Atton sighed. "You know, the Jedi. Force-wielding do-gooders who are too cryptic for their own good and think they've got a monopoly on grave-voiced reflections on how to be a good person. And then they run into battle and everything gets set on fire."

[spectre_alenko]

"I don't have that good an opinion of them," Kaidan said flatly, "Which is why I wanted to hear yours."

[suitably_heroic]

"Yeah, well, you're talking to one," Atton said, rolling his eyes. "Even if I'm one who thinks the old Jedi broke more than they fixed."

[spectre_alenko]

"You're not the only one I've met," Kaidan pointed out, "And you haven't dropped any cryptic do-gooder shit on me. I mean, I'm sure you would, just to be as contrary as possible, but so far you haven't."

[suitably_heroic]

"Because I'm not a big fan of it. If you're want to spout random hints about the future, just go and play pazaak already," Atton said, rolling his eyes. "Thing is, you're not the first one to come in here, hear about the Jedi, and decide to get indignant about it. And that's the exact same behavior the Jedi are famous for, walking in and deciding they know what's good and what isn't."

[spectre_alenko]

"Like I said, I don't like to see my friends hurt," Kaidan repeated flatly. "I'm trying to understand why the Jedi would do what they do. So far, you've given me the most reasonable data. Whether or not it makes me indignant doesn't matter in the slightest. It's not something I could ever do anything about, except try to understand."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton rolled his eyes. "You wanted to know why I kept comparing you to the Jedi," he said, "So I'm telling you."

He took a drag from his cigarette.

"As for what the Jedi do, the Jedi do what they do because if you let Jedi continue to behave like emotional beings all over the place, you wind up with Exar Kun," he said. "The problem is that when you handle it like that, you wind up with Revan. And no one's figured out how to prevent both."

[spectre_alenko]

"I asked what Jedi meant to you. I don't need to know why you compare me to them. Either you mean it, or you mean it to get under my skin," Kaidan shrugged a shoulder. With Atton, it could be either or both all at once.

"Has anyone tried raising those Force sensitive kids to be good people, instead of training them to be ready to throw themselves on grenades?" he asked, sounding a little tired but also genuinely interested. "That's my main problem. They take kids, and they tell them that someday the entire weight of the universe might rest on their shoulders, so they have to be ready to act without emotion. They make children ready to be martyrs. The problems happen when they survive, if they give in to an instinct, or a command, to survive. It breaks them. It shouldn't, but it does."

[suitably_heroic]

"Have you been listening at all to what I've been telling you?" Atton wondered. "The Order before Revan was so scared at the prospect of anyone throwing themselves on anything that even looked like a grenade that they sat around and ran nothing but diplomatic missions while the Mandalorians burned the Outer Rim down."

[spectre_alenko]

"I have, yes," Kaidan said, "They get over that, in the interim thousands of years since, and go right back to it. That's why it's confusing. They seem to swing between two extremes, never in balance. It made me wonder why."

[suitably_heroic]

"I hate to be defending anything about the Jedi," Atton said, "But there's no switch. They probably never woke up in the morning and decided, 'Today is not going to be the day I'm going to teach this kid to be a good person.' They probably thought they were teaching them to be good people. Maybe they even did. Parenting's complicated enough without giving the kids the power to electrocute people with their minds."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan tracked something in the leaves for a moment. Thinking about his own parents, who'd managed to raise him. He thought of the mortality rate of biotic children, teenagers, and why people were afraid of them.

"Probably," he allowed, "I'd like to think so, anyway."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton shrugged. "Take all of this with a grain of salt," he said. "I hate kids, and at the age all these Jedi kids were being trained, I was running around the slums of Alderaan while my non-Jedi parents managed to do a number on me anyway."

[spectre_alenko]

"When did you know you were Force-sensitive?" Kaidan asked, "Or were you, even then?" Realizing how that sounded, he explained. "In my galaxy, we have people with meta-human abilities, but it all comes from exposure to a rare element. It's identifiable on a DNA scan, and humans..well, they keep an eye on any women of childbearing age within a blast radius, if there is one. They pretty much know when one is born."

[suitably_heroic]

"You're born with Force sensitivity, but only the Jedi can really tell if a kid has it or not," Atton said. "I wouldn't have been the first kid that got skipped over. Space, that's what the current Order is made of."

He blew out a plume of smoke. "I didn't know until I was about 21."

[spectre_alenko]

"I heard there was some sort of blood test," Kaidan mentioned.

[suitably_heroic]

"Sure, but only the Jedi administer it," Atton said lightly. "And they usually only take you when you're really young."

[spectre_alenko]

"But by the time you found out, there'd already been Revan's purge?" Kaidan guessed.

[suitably_heroic]

"He was in the middle of it," Atton said, "And I wasn't about to shout it off the rooftops."

The best lies weren't lies at all.

[spectre_alenko]

"What, you didn't immediately snatch a lightsaber out of the ether and jump into the thick of battle?" Kaidan asked wryly, "I mean, that sounds less than a good plan to me, but also totally a Jedi thing to do."

[suitably_heroic]

"Depends on the Jedi," Atton said lightly. "I didn't get involved in any of this until I happened to trip over the last survivor of all the purges."

Yeah, multiple.

[spectre_alenko]

"Revan attacked the temples," Kaidan extrapolated, "Not just ..whatever passes for Jedi government."

If Atton had tripped over the last survivor.. Revan had gone after them wholesale. He'd likely killed the kids.

Atton had, essentially, tripped over the Caleb of his time.

[suitably_heroic]

Good guess. Too bad it was wrong.

"Revan never completed his purge," Atton said. "His second-in-command, Malak, tried to after he got brainwashed, but he didn't succeed either."

He eyed his cigarette for a moment.

"But they destabilised the Jedi governing structure enough that when Nihilus came around and started eating entire planets because there were Jedi on them, well..."

[spectre_alenko]

Well, that was something. At least Revan hadn't gone into a Jedi temple and started hacking Padawans apart, ANAKIN.

The name caused Kaidan to pause a moment, "Nihlus? No, can't be."

[suitably_heroic]

Nah, Revan just gathered hundreds of thousands of largely young soldiers onto one planet and then blew the whole thing up.

"Can't be the same guy," Atton said. "Wears a mask, eats things?"