On Transparency
The Serendipity.
Jallira had never had much to do with making those sorts of deals. Second-hand ships of dubious pedigree, anything that touched on the underworld ... if there was one thing Jallira didn’t entirely understand, it was duplicity. She knew it wasn’t entirely fair - for most of the galaxy, emotions were easy to hide, and they could make their bodies and faces and words all match up to what they wanted to say. She still didn’t understand it. There was no context for it. Facial expression was a mystery to her, something as far out of reach for her as Force-healing was to X’antho. All she saw was a person’s presence in the Force - who they were, or at least who they made their Force pattern show themselves to be. People were a presence beyond the physical to her, and her sense of vision combined with her overly attuned empathy sense made prevarication confusing, frustrating and almost painful to her, like heavily juxtaposed background noise while one tries to concentrate on something else. While she intellectually understood why people didn’t say what they felt, she didn’t understand why people insisted on prevaricating with colleagues, allies and friends. Reticence was one thing, but straightforwardness was all she knew. She’d never known anything else.
Honesty had served them well with the Serendipity. They’d had to ferret out each and every piece of the truth to sway the deal in their favour, though Jallira had seen in X’antho that a lot of the deal was about timing. She’d seen the houk get more and more nervous, knowing that something was going on behind the scenes but not having the wit to determine what it was. If the timing hadn’t been right, the bargain would have been less in their favour. She hadn’t had to tell X’antho any of that, though - he’d had his own ways of knowing. Still, he’d won that battle with honesty, in a way. He’d shown that they didn’t honestly care that the ship used to be Cartel property but that anyone else might give him a significant problem over it, making it in the houk’s interest to get rid of the ship as quickly as possible. He’d shown that they didn’t honestly care about the mynocks and spiderling creatures infesting the lower levels of the ship but that they’d leave him to hire an expensive exterminator if they weren’t sold the ship at the price they wanted. He’d flagged up in no uncertain terms that the three Jedi in their group and the two men who allied themselves with said Jedi would never oblige a woman to have relations with someone as currency. Though Kaelira had done her part in that - she could have shut down the houk’s interest in no uncertain terms, but she hadn’t, seeing his leering for the distraction it was.
The ship would pay for itself, between the prototype engine about which Mychae was still making pleased squee noises and the ludicrous amounts of cargo in a hidden bay somewhere belowdecks. ‘Serendipity’ indeed.
She sometimes felt bad about her way of seeing. With Zach, for instance, she felt bad. Looking at him was a morass of things she didn’t understand but partly recognised, through old friends who’d been hurt too much and vanished because of it, though not without leaving damage in their wake. She’d been very ... direct, with him. She hadn’t thought anything else would get through. She had the feeling, ‘watching’ him leave, that this would cause worse problems later on ... but she still didn’t regret it. Sometimes people needed a push, and if it took a brief spate of problems to clear the air ... well, it might work. Stranger things had happened.
But with X’antho...
The offer he’d made, of the expensive whiskey, if they needed to sweeten the deal ... it had been generous, but she’d experienced what came off of him before. Spacers had people like that - a large Devaronian, an elderly twi’lek... Spacer lives were often brief, and ended too soon to say good-bye. Jedi, much the same. Though she supposed that the prevailing wisdom was that a Jedi, with their warnings about attachments, knew nothing about the need for mementos.
But she had hers, and after the business with Zach, and thinking of X’antho with his costly whiskey, she went over them in her mind. A necklace of feathers and beads. Another, a simple pendant with a green crystal she could see in the Force. The simple band with the small, flat-cut stone she always wore on the third finger of her left hand, under her glove. The datapad primer of saber form theory, that they’d never been able to return to Mae’s first duelling tutor. The cookery datapad. A small pouch of 'sand’ made from ground Force-crystal. A holocron from Alpherides. A pair of boots with knives in the toes. A knife with a carved wooden blade. Her little droid, who now served food but was once a seeing-eye droid. A knitted sweater with too many arms whose hem came past her knees.
She thought of them - the lost and the found, the dead and the missing, the ones she’d return home to that evening and the ones she’d never see again ... and ignoring the tea and the caff laid out, she poured herself a shot of whiskey, as she’d recommended X’antho do for the captain he’d lost, and missed still. The same way she missed her lost. She took a breath and raised the glass. I will not dwell, she told herself, but I will not forget. Touchstones never hurt anyone.
She drank the shot and set the glass back down. People came and went from others’ lives so quickly. Small wonder she didn’t believe in maintaining distance from others through prevarication and confusion-spawned contradictions. Life is too short, and sometimes empathy is all we have, and the thing we need most.