Chapter Text
Loren was waiting for him in the village’s public parking area early the next morning, seated on an all-terrain speeder bike.
“I was thinking we could go up to the old quarry,” she said. “To the lake.”
Davijaan had never been to a quarry or a lake, so he nodded and smiled, and climbed onto the bike behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and trying not to squeeze too hard as they lifted off.
They drove up an old stone-paved road that wound its way up the side of Amuara, the deep early morning shadows and fog of the valley falling away the higher they went, the scattered snow at the peak shining white in the early morning light. It wasn’t a short trip, but Davijaan never tired of looking out over the valley and past to the tundra. Loren was a confident driver, and she was solid and relaxed against his chest. Neither of them tried to speak into the wind.
Eventually they rounded a bend, and Davijaan stared in shock at what must be the quarry. Stunted trees and scrub and lichen did their best to cover the exposed stone, but it looked like a massive explosion had torn deep into the side of the mountain. He couldn’t see the bottom, just the sheer sides. Loose, jagged grey rocks too big around to lift easily tumbled around the edges of the gaping hole in the earth, building a barrier between a narrow trail and the drop.
Loren parked in a cleared patch of ground a ways away from the trailhead, and Davijaan carefully extracted himself from the bike.
“That’s the quarry?” he asked, taking a few steps towards it, tilting his head for a better look.
“The old quarry. The new one is further down and around the mountain. We can’t really see it from here.”
“Looks like a crater from an explosion.”
“Well, there were explosions. Just many small ones over many years, to break the stone from the mountain.”
“Ah.” He’d never wondered how stone was quarried before. Small, focused explosions made sense.
“So,” Loren came to stand level with him, adjusting the bag over her shoulder. “Shall we?”
***
The trail around the edge of the quarry wove in and around boulders and patches of overgrown scrub, sometimes in the shade and sometimes in the sun. If he looked up from his feet Davijaan could see the green slope and the red tundra and the blue sky stretching out ahead of him, and glimpse shimmering water and damp stone through the gaps in the barrier to his right. It was almost too narrow to walk side by side, but they made it work.
Neither of them tried to start a conversation, but periodically Loren would point out a plant or a bird and tell him what it was called. Cranberry and fireweed and moss heather. Pantoran willow and common pine. Ptarmigan and grouse and even a gyrfalcon soaring so high it almost couldn’t be seen. They walked for almost an hour, Loren offering tidbits of information and Davijaan committing them to memory, the path curving to follow the diminishing stone barrier. It was nice, to not have to talk.
“Oh, look!” Loren pointed to a bright green plant growing in a crevice in the stone. “There’s still some blooming!”
“Some what?”
She crouched in front of the plant and parted the green leaves to display two sunny yellow flowers. “Dandelions.”
“Dandelions, eh?” Davijaan reached out and brushed a hand hesitantly over a leaf. There were deep notches all down the sides, making it look as jagged as the stone.
“They’re not native, but they’re not invasive either,” Loren continued. “They’re hardy; they’ll grow just about anywhere, in any conditions. After a wildfire or an earthquake dandelions grow back first. They’ve always been my favorite wildflowers.”
“Do they– most flowers smell nice, right?”
She shrugged. “I’ve never thought dandelions smelled sweet, but they smell fresh. Here.” She picked one of the flowers and held it out.
Davijaan brought the flower up to his nose and took a cautious sniff. “Hm. You’re right, smells more like–”
Something caught in his throat, and he sneezed right in her face.
He reeled back, mortified, dropping the flower in the dirt and trying to apologize through a sudden barrage of sneezes.
Loren just tipped her head back, and laughed. “It’s ok, it’s ok, sometimes the pollen makes people sneeze. Though you… probably should have stopped by now.”
She dug around in her bag for a thermos. “Splash some on your face and take a drink, see if that helps.”
Davijaan managed to hold in a sneeze long enough to follow her instructions, and the water did help. His eyes and nose and throat still itched, but he didn’t feel the overwhelming need to sneeze until he couldn’t breathe anymore.
So, dandelions wanted to kill him. It wasn’t surprising– in his experience most things wanted to kill him. But it was disappointing.
Loren picked up the flower and laid it back on the rock. “They’re edible, too. I was going to see if you wanted to try one, but...”
“Maybe not this time,” Davijaan agreed, trying to discreetly rub at his eyes.
She grimaced, embarrassed, and took a few steps down the trail. “We’re close. And there’ll be plenty of water to wash your face off again once we’re there.”
They fell in beside each other again, and after another five minutes of walking both the trail and the rock barrier dissolved into a thick patch of willow scrub. Davijaan could hear rushing water somewhere beyond it. Loren didn’t even hesitate, ducking down and pushing branches aside to reveal a hollow of sorts. A bright little tunnel formed between the bushes. She crawled in, and he followed.
His eyes and nose started to itch again from the dust and the leaves, but after a minute they emerged from the scrub and onto the carved stone bank of a fast flowing river. Loren stood and stretched and smiled. “Almost there.”
Upstream, to Davijaan’s right, the river poured out of a gap in the boulder barricade that marked the boundaries of the quarry.
“You might want to take your boots off.”
He turned to find Loren already removing hers, and followed suit. She left her own boots and bag next to the tunnel exit, and he set his next to them and followed her barefoot across the stretch of sun warmed stone through a gap between two boulders and into the quarry, and to the lake.
They were standing on the edge of the quarry, on a flat stone ledge. The ledge split a little beyond them, one portion rising higher and higher to form the sheer rock walls he’d glimpsed at first, dotted with patches of lichen and glinting silver in the noon light, the other remaining level and creating a sort of path around the lake. Because at the base of the gaping, ragged chasm in the earth was a lake. An expanse of still water– a perfect mirror to the blue sky above.
The space was simple but not streamlined, at once both empty and alive, and Davijaan wasn’t sure what to make of those distinctions.
“Do you like it?” Loren asked, hushed in the calm.
“I do. I really, really do. This is–”
He turned in a slow circle, the murmur of the river and the whisper of his feet across stone the only noise. “This is amazing. How…”
“My family came here every summer when I was a kid. Other families come up sometimes, too, but it's a bit of a trip.”
“Worth it.”
“I think so.” She smiled. “Speaking of, can you swim?”
“Can I–” He glanced at the water. “Ye-es?” Technically. Maybe. Probably? He hadn’t kept that particular skill sharp.
“Sometime you’ll have to come up with us and swim.” She sat down on the ledge and stuck her bare feet in the water without a second of hesitation. “It’s nice after a long hike.”
He gaped at her. She blinked. “Yes?”
“There aren’t any… things in the water?”
“Things?” she asked, mystified. “Like what?”
Like dead bodies, he didn’t ask.
“Like, I don’t know. Fish. How big are the fish?”
“They get pretty big, but they’re easily scared away.” She grinned and kicked her feet, scattering drops of water to sparkle in the light and sending ripples out across the surface. “They won’t come nibble on your toes, I promise.”
“That’s not…”
“Come sit.” She patted the spot next to her. “Put your feet in. Splash some water on your face.”
Carefully, he sat, rolled his pants up, and dipped his feet in the water. It was shockingly cold and sent a shiver all the way up his body, but it was… nice. It came almost to the lip of the ledge and almost to his knees. He leaned forward and cupped some in his hands, and was able to look past the reflection of the sky and see jumbled stones and silt resting a hundred or more meters below the surface. The water washed away the dust and sweat of the climb and the burning in his eyes; it was cool and sweet on his lips.
He tilted his head back and breathed.
They sat in silence for a long time, taking in the water and the stone and the sky.
Loren sighed, and leaned back on her elbows. “I missed this place when I lived on Coruscant. I missed the quiet. This is the first time I’ve been here in… oh, two years?”
“You could have waited and come up with your family. You don’t have to go out of your way to– to show me around.”
“No, but I want to. It means I get to see all my favorite places again, and it means I get to see your face when you see them, too.”
Davijaan swallowed. “Oh.”
“That’s the good thing about being back– getting to spend time outside, under a real sun. Being reminded there’s more to life than labor. That I live in my body and not in my head, if that makes sense.”
He thought it did, a little. As if the cold water and the hot stone and the absolute stillness of the sky made you more aware of your breath in your lungs and your blood in your veins and the ache in your muscles as you turned to take everything in.
It was grounding. Like a hug.
“Thank you,” he offered, soft. “For bringing me here.”
She sat up and smiled, tattoos scrunching around her eyes, and knocked her shoulder into his. His heart skipped a beat.
“Thank you for the opportunity.”
***
That evening they ended up at the same restaurant they’d eaten lunch at before. This time Davijaan was cognizant enough to read the “Family Restaurant” sign over the door. Whose family, it didn’t say. He wasn’t sure if that meant it was supposed to be a restaurant for families or if part of the sign had fallen off.
Loren didn’t so much as glance at her menu. Davijaan didn’t know enough about the foods listed to make an informed choice of what he wanted to try, and he was alright with ordering the same thing as her, but he read through the whole thing and tried to form a mental picture of the foods he didn’t recognize.
“Do you know what you want?”
He looked up to find Loren leaning over the table and staring at his menu. “Uh…”
“You could try this.” She pointed at a dish.
Fish dumplings, eh? He’d tried dumplings once, out with Hawk exploring the lower levels, and they’d been so spicy he’d choked on them. “Are you recommending this to me so you can laugh at the face I make when I try them?”
She gasped in mock horror. “What have I ever done to deserve such an accusation!”
Davijaan raised an unimpressed eyebrow, but when the server approached he ordered the fish dumplings.
When their food arrived and he steeled himself to take a bite, he was pleased to discover that fish dumplings were mildly seasoned and flaky and delicious. And that Loren wasn’t laughing. He took another bite.
She poked at her roasted tubers, watching him eat with a small smile. “Do you like them?”
“I– Yes.”
“I thought you might. Strong flavors seem to shock you.”
He rolled his eyes and tried the pickled vegetables that came with the meal. They were sour, but not the kind of sour that hurt to eat. He actually liked the contrast with the dumplings.
“What do you like to eat?” Loren asked, taking a bite of her food.
“What do I– what?”
“What do you like to eat? Or, what do you and your brother cook at home?”
“Um… we don’t? Cook?”
She blinked at him. “Really? Well, what do you eat if you don’t cook?”
He took another bite of dumpling, but she waited for him to answer. “We buy pre-made stuff, mostly. We’ve got the hang of boiling water to rehydrate foods, but we never learned to cook.”
“Oh.”
They ate for a few minutes in silence, and then Loren cleared her throat and said, “I could maybe teach you some things? I’m not a very good cook myself, but I could at least show you the basics. If you’d like me to. Only if you’d like me to. I don’t mean to imply–”
“No, I think–” Davijaan fussed with his fork, realized what he was doing, and set it down to focus on her properly. “I think I would like you to. It’s something I probably ought to learn, right?”
“Probably.” She shrugged, huffed a laugh. “It might make life easier, at least. It did for me when I first moved out. Buying everything pre-made gets very expensive very quickly. My first few weeks working at CorNN I bought breakfast on my way to work every morning and didn’t stop to add up the bills until I’d exhausted my food budget for the month.”
She told stories of learning to cook as a child, and trying to recreate those recipes on a budget and with unfamiliar ingredients during her first few months in the city. Davijaan listened and asked questions and ate his fish dumplings, and when the server came back he paid the bill.
***
Loren arrived at the house early on the morning of his next day off, her bag slung over her shoulder and a large basket held in both hands. Davijaan met her at the door and took the basket, setting it carefully on the table. Kote wasn’t up yet. They should have the house to themselves, as long as they were quiet. He turned to find Loren walking slowly around, taking in the mostly empty room curiously.
He’d bought furniture– a table and chairs, a desk, a couch. He hadn’t been sure what else was supposed to go inside, to use or to decorate. Barrack walls were always covered in pinups and film posters and painted murals, and he wasn’t sure if that was the kind of thing civilians had in their living rooms.
He’d laid out his collection of trinkets on the desk for lack of anywhere better to put them, and now Loren stopped in front of them. She didn’t touch, but she studied the model ship Wolffe had bought him and the bit of asteroid he’d pulled out of his engine after a close call and the brightly colored woven… thingy Fiddle had made. (Bracelet? Ribbon? Fiddle had said it was for luck or something. He’d worn it wrapped it around his wrist under his gauntlet for every single battle thereafter without bothering to ask what it was supposed to be.)
“Are these souvenirs?” She asked.
He shrugged. She turned her curious gaze on him, but didn’t push.
“You’ve got a nice place here.”
“Thanks. We like it.”
He liked it. He liked having his own space to do whatever he wanted and he liked not being responsible to anyone but himself for how clean it was. He wasn’t sure if Kote liked it or not. It was hard to make him talk most days. Davijaan wasn’t sure what to do other than wait. He didn’t know what might or might not happen in the future if Kote didn’t– if he never–
“Shall we?” Loren asked, moving towards the kitchen area. Davijaan followed, studiously not thinking about it.
“I thought we could make pancakes,” she said, opening the basket and laying ingredients out on the table. “They’re easy and very filling. Which is perfect for me because despite my generous offer to teach you I am in fact a terrible cook.”
“Well, you know how to use an oven, so you’ve got that on me at least.”
She grinned, setting a wobbly bag of flour down with a hum. “I suppose I do. Do you have a mixing bowl? And a pan?”
“Maybe? I think?” He started opening cupboards. He’d bought the kitchen things the lady at the shop had recommended, but they hadn’t been used much. He didn’t know where Kote had stashed them.
“I brought my own just in case.”
“Let me see if I can find it, I think–” He opened the cupboard over the stove and a dozen pots pans came spilling out to clatter over the floor. He stumbled aside, but one still managed to smack him in the face on its way down.
“Ouch, shit–”
“Are you ok?”
“I found the pan.”
He set it on the counter and pressed the heel of his palm hard against the stinging spot on his forehead, and quickly started picking up the rest of the fallen pots, grumbling under his breath about dumb brothers and dumb metal pans and dumb cupboards.
“Here, let me help.”
Loren abandoned her ingredients to climb up and kneel on the counter, and he passed things up to her to stack in the cupboard. The sooner they got the mess cleaned up the sooner they could start the damn cooking lesson.
“Davi?” a voice called from the stairwell. “What are you doing?”
Davijaan flinched, and dropped the pot he was handing off with a crash. Kote always slept late, he was supposed to stay asleep and downstairs until after Loren left. He was supposed to–
“I, uh. A friend came over!” he called, hurriedly stooping to pick it up again, knowing Loren had noticed the name and hoping she hadn’t noticed either the flinch or the way his voice cracked. “We’re trying to cook!”
Kote padded up the stairs and into the kitchen, blinking, dressed in wrinkled sleep clothes and hair a tangled mess. He slowly took in Davijaan standing frozen by the stove with the pot, half a dozen more scattered around the floor at his feet, and Loren sitting on the clean counter with one hand inside the cupboard.
Loren waved. “Hello!”
“Um. Hello?”
On the table, the sack of flour fell over with a thump. The noise seemed to wake Kote up the rest of the way. He took a step forward and poked at the flour.
“What are you making?”
“Pancakes!” Loren announced, bright and cheerful, and Davijaan could have kissed her for not commenting on Kote’s… anything.
No, he absolutely could not. Shut the fuck up, brain.
After cycling through the appropriate embarrassment, horror, and resignation, Davijaan set the pot on the stove and waved Kote over.
“This is Loren. Loren, this is my brother.”
Loren hopped off the counter with a smile and stuck her hand out Coruscanti style. “Pleasure to meet you. Odd Ball’s told me a lot about you.”
Kote raised an eyebrow, glancing between Loren and Davijaan– and if he said something about nice hands Davijaan might have to kill him outright– but then he straightened his shoulders and shook her hand.
“Likewise, ma’am.”
“Oh, Loren’s fine. And, it's Cody, right? Like the Marshal Commander?”
Kote blinked. Davijaan cleared his throat. “Yup, that’s him.”
Loren froze. “You’re… Marshal Commander Cody. Of the 7th Sky Corps?”
“Ah, yes?”
Loren dropped his hand and whirled around, eyes blazing. “You didn’t tell me your brother was one of the highest ranking officers in the GAR!”
Davijaan took a step back. “Technically, every officer in the GAR is my brother.”
“Oh, yes, and I’m sure you know all hundred thousand of them personally, and they all decided to move to the edge of the known universe with you on a whim! How many other officers do you have sleeping in your basement, Odd Ball? How do you feed them when you can’t even turn on an oven?”
And Davijaan was used to how people reacted when they found out he was close with Kote; he knew the pattern like he knew the borders of the shadow he’d always stood in. But “people” had always meant “clones” in the past, and Loren’s shock and exasperation did not feature in the usual scenario.
Kote looked like he was either about to laugh or jump out the window, but when Davijaan met his eyes over Loren’s shoulder and silently begged for help, he cleared his throat and offered, “We’re batchmates.”
“Batchmates?” She said it carefully, frowning at the unfamiliar word.
“Decanted from the same batch. Batches do everything together growing up.”
“Like twins, I guess,” Davijaan added. Even though that wasn’t an accurate comparison at all.
Loren’s eyes narrowed. “You know, you never told me what your rank was, either. Were you secretly a big name and I’m just too ignorant to connect the dots?”
“Ah, no.” He huffed a laugh. “Sorry to disappoint, I’m just a lowly flight squad Commander.”
“Hm.”
“Lowly, nothing.” Kote slung an arm around Davijaan’s shoulders and grinned. “Odd Ball’s one of the best pilots in the fleet.”
“Is that so?” she said.
“That's a bit of an exaggeration–”
“Don’t downplay–”
Davijaan gave him a look that said, Don’t, and Kote didn’t.
He did sigh and raise an eyebrow that asked, Do you want me to leave?
Davijaan hesitated, and gave a half shrug that meant, Not really. Not if it meant Kote slinking off downstairs again. “If Loren’s alright with that,” he said aloud, and turned back to find her looking at them with a bemused smile.
“Alright with what?” Right. She wasn’t fluent in Kote and Davi eyebrows.
“Alright if I stay?” Kote asked. “I don’t have to be involved, I can just sit and watch, but–”
“Of course you can stay! It’s your home, your kitchen.” She seemed offended by the very suggestion that he leave. “And we’re going to make more than enough food for three.”
Kote brightened a bit, and helped Loren pick up the last of the pots and pans on the floor, and then the three of them got started on the pancakes.
It was deceptively simple. You just measured out the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients into a bowl and mixed them into a batter, and then fried spoonfuls in a pan. But the frying part was tricky. Davijaan burned his first pancake to the bottom of the pan, and they had to set it in the sink to soak and heat up a new one. He was only marginally more successful on his second try. Kote got the hang of it after three attempts and tried to tell Davijaan it was all in the timing. Even Loren burned a few.
It was tricky, but they slowly worked their way through the bowl of batter, Kote and Davijaan jostling each other for space in front of the stove and fiddling with the heat settings and Loren teasing and stirring a pot of berry sauce. Davijaan let Kote and his impeccable timing do the honor of frying the last pancake as he helped Loren plate the finished ones and pour sauce over them.
They ate on the porch, legs dangling over the sides, a cool breeze against their faces. The pancakes were amazing; the sweet berry sauce did a good job of covering the burnt taste. And there was something about eating food that he’d made, with his friend and his brother.
When they were finished Loren and Davijaan left Kote sitting on the porch and took the dishes inside to clean up. Loren wiped the counters and table down and started packing her unused ingredients away while Davijaan tried to scrub the char off the bottom of the pan. If he’d ruined another one he was going to be highly annoyed.
“Here, let that soak for a good hour or three.” Loren took the pan from him and filled it with soapy water, and set it on the counter. “I’ll wash and you dry?”
He collected the cloth he’d used on the few occasions he’d done dishes, and came to stand a careful distance from her in front of the sink.
“So,” she said, handing him the first clean plate. “That’s Cody.”
“That’s Cody.” He kept his eyes on the plate and his tone light. “He live up to your expectations?”
“Oh, he surpassed them.” She knocked her shoulder against his with a teasing smile. “It’s not every day you see a Marshal Commander in his pajamas.”
Davijaan kept his face carefully blank.
She sobered, studying him. “He’s not… he’s not doing very well, is he,” she said, quiet. “You never talk about what he’s up to these days, and he seems–”
“He’s still adjusting,” Davijaan cut in. “He’s still– He’s still just–”
“It’s alright, you don’t have to explain.” She turned back to the sink. “I can’t imagine what the war must have been like, for him. For you. I hope he starts doing better soon. For both your sakes.”
He didn’t respond, and she handed him the next plate silently.
After working for a few more minutes in silence, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about him?”
Instead of pointing out that he had told her about his brother, a great deal more than he told most people, in fact, he shoved the last plate in the cupboard and said, “Didn’t come up.”
“The same way being a pilot never came up?”
“How did you even know who he was?” In his experience most civilians had no idea how rank worked, let alone which clones were ranked at the top.
“Well, I, um.” She was focused intently on scrubbing away a bit of char stuck to the spatula. “I may have… written an article on him?”
He blinked. “You– what?”
She sighed. “Remember I told you my old boss was upset that I wouldn’t write about Umbara?”
“Yes.”
“Well. He said he had no use for a reporter who wouldn’t report on her own experiences, and I almost socked him in the jaw.”
He made a strangled noise and she flashed him a quick smile before focusing back on the sink.
“I didn’t tell him about you exactly,” she continued, in the same intentionally casual tone. “But I said I’d met a clone, and instead of Umbara I’d like to put together something on the clones, because we’d covered everything else war related. He said if I’d met one clone I’d met them all and it was a waste of time to report on something the public wasn’t interested in. I wrote the article anyway.”
She handed him the clean mixing bowl. He just held it, staring at her. “I couldn’t find public information on clones other than high ranking officers, because they worked so closely with the Jedi. But I found holos and bits and pieces about victories and losses and threw something together on the officer who seemed the most widely recognized.”
“Cody.”
“Yeah. Marshal Commander Cody.” She smiled, grim. “I turned it in to my boss. He told me to scrap it or clean out my desk.”
“You got fired?”
“No.” She turned the water on with more force than necessary and started loudly rinsing utensils. “I quit.”
“You quit your job. Over an article you wrote on my dumb brother.”
“He's got a very impressive record.”
“I know. I was there. I just… You quit your job over an article about clones?”
“I quit my job for a lot of reasons, but that was the breaking point, yes.” Her shoulders hunched, and she set the dripping forks and knives on the counter when he didn’t reach to take them from her. “It seemed silly to write about my own experience with war when nobody had bothered to write about the clones’. You and your brothers fought the war, and won it. Bled and died in it.” She looked up at him, eyes hard.
“And that, to me, sounds like a story that matters.”
***
“What’s wrong?”
Davijaan blinked back to himself, and re-focused on Loren’s speeder as it started down the road back to the village.
“She– she just says things sometimes, and she means them completely seriously, but they’re so– they’re so–”
And that, to me, sounds like a story that matters.
He shook his head.
“Huh.” Kote leaned against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “Care to share?”
“No.”
“Alright.”
They watched Loren disappear around a bend, and then Kote turned to Davijaan, lips curving with a hint of a smile.
“Well, vod, you were right.”
Davijaan squinted suspiciously. “Kote…”
He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “She does have very nice hands.”
“I am never telling you anything ever again, get back here–”
Kote laughed as he was chased inside and tackled to the floor, and it was the best sound Davijaan had ever heard.