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The Deck, Sunday Morning

It wasn't that Atton didn't know they were supposed to be setting up tents, it was that he couldn't be bothered to.

He'd spent enough time in subpar living conditions on Nar Shaddaa (and... elsewhere) to know that he wanted to avoid being in them at all costs whenever he got the chance. Right now, that meant stalling time until he actually had to deal with them. And hey-- if he waited long enough, someone else might have set up his tent for him, right?

So he'd be spending his time out here today. Hanging back in a seat on the desk, flipping pazaak cards. Been too long since he met anyone who knew how to play the game, and he didn't want to lose his knack for it. In a way, he was working, really.

Never hurt to remember how to play pazaak.

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Sparkle's hair was, surprisingly, rather presentable this morning. As was the rest of him, oddly enough. After all, he had to head off to work in about half an hour, and Ms. Maggotbone hadn't said that he needed to dress nicely or else he'd find his spleen torn out and fed to hungry demons, but it had certainly been implied.

She hadn't said anything about him showing up smelling like cigarette smoke, though, so he was going to step out onto the deck for a smoke before heading to work. And give Atton a bit of a sideways glance as he dug around in his pocket for the cigarette that he'd tucked away in there.

"Aren't people supposed to be setting up those tents or whatever today?"

Yeah, sure, bring that up. Atton tossed a +1/-1 card onto the table and looked up. "Are we?" he drawled. "Guess that must have slipped my mind."

"Yeah, well," Sparkle managed to locate the errant cigarette, wrinkling his nose a little as he surveyed it to see that it had been bent a little in his pocket. "Looks like half the boys are stuck in tents with all girls. Which, hey, maybe they don't need our help to set them up or something, but I bet they won't let us live it down if they end up doing it themselves."

Yes, Sparkle thought about these things. How insufferable would three girls be if he just left them to handle the tent on their own?

You know, it was that the voice was familiar - and that Atton wasn't nearly as good at forgetting a face as he sometimes pretended to be - or he might have almost thought this guy was a new kid.

He shot Sparkle a mildly quizzical look. "And we should care about this why, exactly?" he said. "If the girls can handle themselves, they'll handle themselves." Beat. "Yeah, there's the whole 'communal spirit' argument, but I never saw the point of that."

"I dunno," Sparkle admitted. "I guess so that they don't decide to leave bear crap in your sleeping bag," were there even bears on this island? "Or tie your boxers to a flagpole or something. They're setting up the place you're going to be sleeping for a bit. They're going to want you to make up for that somewhere."

Sparks kind of loathed being indebted to people.

Now, where did he leave that lighter?

"If they do, I don't care if they're male or female, I'll just get a hotel room," said Atton.

Actually, he didn't really have the money for that; maybe he could sleep in the woods. That seemed almost cosy in a place like this, which had to be at least a hundred times more hygienic than Nar Shaddaa.

"There's no reason to start wetting yourself."

"You can afford a hotel room for that long?" Sparkle momentarily looked like he wasn't quite sure whether he should be disgusted, or impressed. In the end, he settled for 'fuck it,' mostly because he'd found his lighter and he could actually start the smoke that he'd come out for.

He blew a ring of smoke, watching it lazily drift into nothing before he shrugged and looked back at Atton.

"Look, I couldn't give a shit what you do," he replied. "If that's how you want to do it, it's your life. Hotel food's probably better than eating like hot dogs and canned beans and burned coffee all the time anyhow."

With Sparkle putting it like that, Atton was almost regretting not giving in and going Jedi or Sith and mastering the mind tr-- yeah, no. Not for even a second.

He shrugged. "It doesn't matter anyway," he agreed, "There's some other guy on my tent roster. If this fabled uprising of women does happen, I won't be alone."

He was still not really grasping the whole 'being afraid of the girls in particular' thing here.

"Lucky," Sparkle decided, wrinkling his nose. Again. It was shaping up to be a good day for that, it seemed. "I'd kill to have another guy in my tent. Like, what am I going to have to do, chase three chicks out when I want to change? Just wear the same underwear the whole time? Oh god, they're going to think that I'm actually looking or something, like, oh no, they're in their pajamas Sparkle is going to think they're so sexy or something and I'll just be trying to get some sleep."

A beat.

"If they stay up all night giggling with one another, I'm going to smother someone with a pillow."

No, he wouldn't.

"Said it yourself, just keep wearing the same underwear," said Atton, who might have picked up a little bit of Nar Shaddaa's hygiene code over the past few months. (His shipmates on the Ebon Hawk, ten years from now, would thank him for it. Really.)

"That, and avoid greasing your engine," he suggested. "In the tent, I mean."

Thanks, Atton.

Well. Sparkle was going to bark out a harsh caw of a laugh at that, waving his cigarette about for a moment while he worked on regaining a bit of his composure. For whatever level of the word 'composure' Sparkle ever managed to gain in the first place.

"Okay, that's pretty good advice," he cackled, shooting a grin at Atton and deciding that, okay, maybe he kinda liked the guy sort of a little or something. "But if it'll scare the girls off, maybe I'll just do it more."

Yeah. That would go over well.

"And here I thought you were terrified of being emasculated," Atton said, "Or having dung dropped on you by pissed-off women."

"Better no girls around at all than a bunch of angry ones sharing my tent," Sparkle pointed out, because it made a certain measure of sense to him, at least. "If they scurry off crying grooooooosssss, then they're not right there!"

BRILLIANT.

"That's going to drag you through for about fifteen minutes," Atton said. He agreed with the narrative here, and he was kind of an expert in--

Actually, scratch that. Nobody really needed to know all the crap Atton was an expert in.

"Maybe convince them you're sick," he said. "They might not all leave the tent, but they're sure as hell going to try to avoid your side of it."

Oh, hey. There was an idea, too.

"I wonder what the symptoms are for the bubonic plague," Sparkle mused.

It couldn't possibly go wrong!

Brief pause.

"Yeah, I've never heard of that," he said, "So you're on your own. I mean, I could think of a couple of plagues, but unless you feel like running around dressed like a rakghoul..."

"And, see, I don't even know what that is," Sparkle countered. "But if you described one, I might be convinced to give it a try."

... He would actually consider it, too.

Edited 2012-06-10 19:52 (UTC)

"Ugly," Atton offered. "Brown, claws, bulges in places nobody needs bulges..."

Stop looking so thoughtful, Sparkle.

"But how bulgy are the bulges?"

No.

Atton helpfully demonstrated with his hands. "That's on the head, anyway," he said. "I've seen pictures."

Actually, he'd been to Taris himself one time, but qi-rah-dish, qi-ray-dish.

"Naaaaaasty," Sparkle decided, grinning broadly as he did so. "Wouldn't be able to get my hand on that much make-up all at once, but damn, that would make for a kickass Halloween costume or something."

Just take his word for it.

"You got a lot of really... different stuff like that where you're from, huh?"

"Apparently I'm from a whole different universe," Atton said, kicking back in his seat. Hey, another universe suited him just fine - there were less Hutts here, and definitely less Sith, so that was a tick in the win column. "Don't know how you people get by being stuck on this one planet all the time, but at least it's a decent one."

High praise, coming from the guy who'd spent the past half year or so living on the moon voted Most Toxic, Corrupt and Generally Unpleasant fifty years running.

Really, it couldn't be much worse than the stinkhole neighbourhood in Toronto that Sparkle had spent most of his time in.

Maybe.

"Decent enough, I guess," Sparkle replied, shrugging and inhaling another lungful of smoke. "Never left the planet, so maybe I just don't know what I'm missing, but until I came here, I was stuck in the same damn city."

"You're kidding me," Atton said.

Hey, he wasn't above vague prompts for more information if it kept him from having to cough up too many details.

"Nah," Sparkle replied, shrugging his shoulders and exhaling. "If I was kidding you, I would have told you way more than that."

That was about as close to a heads-up as Sparkle was going to give, regarding his propensity for tall tales.

And Atton lied about everything for practical reasons! Weren't they a pair?

"Can people even do that?" he said, dropping his feet on the table and scattering some of his pazaak cards.

"What, just grow up in the same neighbourhood? Never see what's outside of the borders of the city you were born in?" Sparkle looked a little amused at the question, all truth told. "You start by spending more time worrying about your next meal than you do about getting out and seeing the world. I could've left the city, sure, but it would have been all on foot, and where the hell would I go anyway? Easier to get by when you know your streets like the back of your hand."

"Where I'm from, a kid would've just stowed away on a ship, hope they're bound somewhere nice, like Coruscant," Atton said. "Most people aren't going to toss someone out the airlock mid-flight."

"Yeah, but they won't hesitate to throw you on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere Ontario, or to call Social Services or call the cops, and I don't do well behind bars," Sparkle noted, sounding far too carefully casual to be really all that casual at all.

Call it a hunch or call it experience, but Atton picked up on that, yeah.

"Well, who would?" he said. "Tents are bad enough. Bars just sound drafty."

He was just not going to go into it. Call that courtesy.

"Drafty," Sparkle echoed, and then snorted and shrugged. "Something like that, anyhow. If it was just as easy as stowing away on something, though, I probably would've done it. Maybe some other planet would have been better, who knows?"

"Some of them don't even smell like refuse," Atton said cheerfully. "If they're not getting bombed to Hell and back by the Mandalorians, but that's just a minor detail."

Really.

"Oooh, only minor bombing? Score."

Yeah, Sparkle didn't really mind Toronto so much, in retrospect.

"Don't see much of that in Toronto, really. But the winters in most of Canada are pretty shitty. Kind of a trade-off, I guess."

"How bad are we talking here? Hoth?" Atton asked.

Beat.

"Hoth's covered in ice and snow every damned day out of its year," he elaborated.

"Ah," Sparkle replied, raising an eyebrow a little. "Nah. It's only like Hoth if you ask an American, I think. If you go far enough North, maybe. But in Toronto, the summers are pretty hot, too. So I guess maybe it evens out. Still, you don't want to be stuck sleeping outside in the middle of winter, either way."

"Pity about the bombing," Atton drawled. "I hear it's usually pretty easy to find somewhere to stay if half the city's burning."

Canada: more practical when bombed. You heard it here first.

Sparkle was making a note of that one, yep.

"Nothing a jerrycan of gasoline and a lit match can't fix," he noted. "Adding arson to my resumé would definitely keep it interesting, I suppose."

He considered his mostly-spent cigarette, and then stubbed out the last of it against the dormitory wall.

"Yeah, well, stay smart and don't burn down the dorms while you're still living in them," Atton said, leaning forward to pick a bunch of his cards off the table. "Now that's a rookie mistake."

"I try to stay out of the habit of burning down the places I'm living," Sparkle scoffed. "Great way to find yourself right up shit creek all over again. Nah. The tents are going to suck, but we've got it good enough here. We're not starving, anyhow."

"I'm surprised they don't go out of business with all this free food they hand out," Atton mused. Not that he was complaining here. "They've got to be feeding-- what, fifty kids?"

"Something like that, yeah. Somebody's gotta have really deep pockets to want to keep this place open. I don't think it's a public school, though. The government doesn't cough up money for camping trips or anything, for public schools."

A beat.

"Well, I don't think so. Maybe America does. But I doubt that."

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The Deck, Sunday Morning

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