The sky was a lovely shade of orange.
The pinks, Lex had seen, and the purples for sure, but rarely had the Mordesh ever seen such a beautiful orange. Or maybe he’d never noticed before. Or maybe he was just in the right state of mind for an orange sky. It looked lovely.
The gunslinger stood for a little while among the knee-high grass, staring out into the horizon, letting his thoughts come and go as they so desired. He had nowhere in particular to be, save that Sezar was finishing up with a patient, and after that would come dinner, and after that…
Not much of anything. He hadn’t taken a job in months. It was an unusual state of being for him— the rapper turned space refugee turned bounty hunter, always on the go, always full of energy, had grown tired. Not in a way that had concerned him (though Sezar had fallen to worry, as he always did) but in a way that led to him staying home more. Playing with the dogs. Catching up on those books he’d been planning to get around to. Trying new recipes.
Was age finally catching up to him? He’d lost track of the years a long time ago, but it felt like it was finally time to start being Old™, or at least older, more mature, more grounded in some sense of worldly purpose. Even back on Grismara, this had felt like something far away and unattainable, that youth would always last forever, and in a way, it had… though not in the way Lex had expected or desired.
He was married now, after all. And so were his friends, and friends of those friends. Some of them were starting families, or making them, where and how they could— pulling together the scraps of who all had come to Nexus looking for something better, stitching them together into something beautiful, something new. There wasn’t really anything like safety, or stability; not here, not now, or even in the foreseeable future, while the war still raged on. But people were finding something close to it, trying to make their way in this shitty, dangerous little world.
Even himself, Lex realized, almost idly. It wasn’t something he’d known he wanted, but he’d gotten it anyway. A reprieve. An excuse, or a blessing, to slow down, and to appreciate. No longer required to burn like a wildfire, or to live life at 100 miles per hour. There was time for meeting up with old friends in dingy bars; there was time for long walks through Thayd; there was time to watch sunsets and notice the colors he hadn’t seen before.
There was time for lots of things.
Idly, the Mordesh pulled out his communicator, pulling up the contact list to scroll through it. It’d gotten longer and shorter over the years, as lists like these tended to do, but there was still one name on there that Lex had never really brought himself to delete. He wasn’t sure if it would still work— there was a good chance it didn’t, and an even better chance that nobody would pick up. But he called it anyway, holding the device to his ear, letting the grass brush around his knees and the edges of his coat move in the breeze.
It rang and it rang, but there was plenty of time, and Lex was happy to wait.