Sleeping Spaces
The Finalizer annoyed Kevan to no end. All the stuffy officers, all the armored soldiers – it was so impersonal. “Knight Ren.” One of those irksome officers approached him as he descended from the ramp, helmet on. He wondered, briefly, if they knew him from Gnaeus.
They probably all looked the same.
“How did the meeting with Grakkus go?”
Well at least they knew his mission, “Tell General Hux that Terex fucked it all up.”
“Um, I don’t – ”
“Terex. Fucked. It. Up. Four words. Not that hard,” Kevan was irked and he kept his strides long to demonstrate that.
Terex had royally fucked it up in trying to kill Grakkus some time back, and let Poe Dameron save Grakkus. So of course, the rich hutt with all the Jedi artifacts was unwilling to work with the First Order. Snoke, though? Promise a few Sith artifacts they didn’t need, and Grakkus was putty.
But he couldn’t say that. No, for all intents and purposes, Grakkus was not an ally to the First Order.
“But what happened!” The officer asked, just as Kevan reached the wing where Kylo Ren was, and as if there was an invisible wall, he stopped. He didn’t dare to get closer to the domain of the temperamental commander of the Knights.
So Kevan at least had some peace.
And Kylo Ren wasn’t there, but he did feel a familiar presence. That led him to the door of the room, so rarely occupied.
He knocked, but he didn’t wait for a response before he opened the door to catch the blonde with her hair down, mask off, almost looking…normal…standing in black slacks of some satiny material and a button up black shirt.
There was a half-empty coffee mug, and he imagined she’d been through quite a few of those from the darkness under her eyes. “Kevan?”
“Miss me?” He opened his arms as if he expected her to run to him, but she just scowled and turned back to her work.
Which, as Kevan noticed, was filling the entire room.
A map that he’d never be able to understand was laid out over the room, projected via a holoprojector. A datapad hovered in the air, linked with the holoprojector, as Mira moved the very stars and planets about, making everything fit together seamlessly, “I’m busy right now.”
“Clearly,” he was actually impressed, “What is all of this?” he asked, shutting the door and stepping into it.
The blue lit his face. The stars sparkled in his eyes as he walked through it, not causing any disturbance to the waves of light. It didn’t register his signature as one to allow changes to it.
“Wild Space,” she told him, “Snoke called me back when I’d traveled through one hundred planets, to start to work on mapping them and recording their information. There isn’t a good map of Wild Space out there. Not like this.”
Not with the details of fauna and life. Of sentience. Of distances, of the spaces between – the asteroid fields. Not the climates. Nothing. There were details scattered about, mostly in Imperial records, thanks to Palpatine, but most of those had been lost.
“Named’em yet? You get to, right?”
“I haven’t,” she said, swiping her hand to bring up the next planet, dully labeled ‘67’. “No point to it. The numbers work.”
“Then let me name one. That one.” He gestured to ‘69’.
Mira rolled her eyes, but then swiped it closer to herself, “What do you want to call it, Kevan?” it’d be forgotten by history, when people began to colonize it. When Wild Space became the next Outer Rim.
“Tell me about it.”
A slight cant to her head. Then, “69 was one of the planets with an Imperial station on it, and a strong presence in the Force, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Nearly inhospitable, it is a dry and cold planet, except for a few rare oases. They did produce rather good food, and the water was always delicious, but that might just be because I was usually starving and famished when I found one.” Never a good mix, “No intelligent life, but plenty of small things, small mammalian creatures for the most part.”
‘Imperial station….’ Something important was there, then, that Mira hadn’t found.
He wanted the planet to stick out. To be a reminder.
So, he answered: “Oneiroi.”
And watched her freeze.
There were few insights he had into her past as Ceres Mandon, but this was one. Coruscant, though a home for the Jedi, still had a domestic religion. Many on Coruscant had believed they had a familial guardian that protected families.
Oneiroi was the name of the Mandon guardian, depicted among stars. Dreams, she’d said it meant, or something like it.
Like Ceres meant evil, if spelled just a little differently. Growth was the other alternative – or really, to decay, or to grow. Both seemed equivalent to Kevan. Destruction caused creation and viceversa. “What? Sounds like it has potential, if there’s an Imperial station there. Something worth dreaming about.”
She didn’t jot the name down. She swiped back to 67, mood soured. “I’ve been meaning to ask – what are you looking for in Wild Space, anyway?”
“Kyber crystals, mostly,” she answered, “They’re useful for massive weapons. Also anything else similar, the Imperial stations, planets where the Force is strong….”
“What Palpatine was looking for?” Kevan pressed.
Mira’s confused look told him as much – she didn’t know what he meant. “What was Palpatine looking for?” She’d figured the Imperial stations were just part of Palpatine’s larger plan in general of understanding the Universe to rule it.
“Nothing,” he shook his head, shook it off. “Just something I heard a few Officers talking about. How I knew you were here,” he put on a smile.
“You’re a poor liar.”
“Only around you,” he took a seat on her bed, “Come lay down. You haven’t slept in a while, have you?”
“No, Kevan.”
“Just sleep!”
“Go get me coffee if you want to be helpful.”
“Tch,” but he pushed himself up from the bed, “Fine. Then I’m going to sleep.”
Kevan returned.
He made good on his promise to sleep, as well, falling to sleep in Mira’s bed. He hadn’t put the covers over himself, or even gotten a pillow, because he actually hadn’t planned to sleep. He woke up to find his head on a pillow, though, and the blankets over him.
He found Mira in the chair at her desk, nodding off, and he laughed softly to himself. “Prude,” he teased.
She didn’t hear the word, but heard his voice, and blinked open her eyes, “Mm?”
He just smiled, “So can I tell Kylo we slept together?”
He was smothered with a pillow. Damn the Force.