WIP Wednesday: With These Will I Go
Thrass stared into those cool, green eyes. It was the first time he'd felt himself reflected in the eyes of another in some time, and supremely unsettling. “Lieutenant Mittens is a patently ridiculous name," he said.
“It’s not my name,” the tooka said.
“No?”
“It’s just the name they call me to make themselves feel important by contrast," he said between flicks of his tail. "They don’t define me.”
“Why do you stay?" Thrass asked. "Surely you could slip out if you really had a mind to.”
The tooka shrugged. Tookas really could, you know. “Someone has to look after him now… and she asked me to.”
Thrass followed the direction of the Tooka’s twitching tail to a holo glinting on what might have been a pa’ino if it had the right number of keys. In some cultures you could confuse a wedding from a funeral pretty easily, but there was no mistaking what this holo was. A Human woman with dark skin and curly black hair was smiling so bright Thrass couldn’t make out the color of her eyes. But he’d bet they were as rich and warm as her smile. She was beside a man—Yularen, he supposed, but with dark blonde hair and no mustache—pulling him closer and pushing him away and laughing all at once. It was a wedding, and a happy one.
He glanced at the hook by the door. The one coat. The one pair of shoes on the mat.
“How did she die?”
“The same way most people die these days,” the tooka said. “It wasn’t convenient for her to be alive anymore so she stopped.”
“Inconvenient for whom?”
A shrug.
“So you don’t know how she died,” Thrass said shrewdly.
Another shrug. “How did you die?” the tooka countered.
“I don’t like to think about it.”
“What else do you have to do?” Mittens asked. “You can’t exactly play piano.”
Piano. Interesting. Perhaps it was true what they said—that we were close, once, we distant bookends of the galaxy. Thrass looked for Thrawn. He was in the refresher now, doing the things living people did while pretending that’s not what made them alive. From where Thrass was sitting, it was.
The tooka was more right than he knew. It wasn’t only that there was nothing else to do: Thrass suspected there was nothing else he was supposed to do. Because Thrawn didn’t listen to him. If he were meant to stay by his side as some sort of inept guardian, that was some joke to play. But Thrawn wasn’t just someone to follow, he was a reminder. A star-tag on his questis linking him back to something in an earlier document, a note to himself that said, ‘I know you’ll forget, Thrass, so when you do, go here and look. Read this again.’
“Well…” Thrass began, eyes drifting back to the solitary shoes at the door.