The Nerf Nest, Two Levels Below The Surface, Coruscant, Saturday Afternoon

[suitably_heroic]

Not every dining establishment on Coruscant had the privilege of being housed on the top level; the Nerf Nest was hidden away in a street some two levels down. It was nice, though. Sunlight still reached this place. Also, the slightly longer walk was good for Sparkle, considering Atton had slightly toned down the workout today.

He had to make up for that somehow.

He felt a little lighter, being back here. It was weird. This week had felt like he was sliding back into whatever hole he'd been in last year, with an extra dose of weird paranoia. Kinda like the island was tired, and it was taking it out on Atton, or something.

Whatever. It was good to be out of that for a minute. He was having a hard enough time repressing the fact he was turning thirty today without the island messing with his head.

"I like this place," he said, as he stepped into the restaurant properly. "Doesn't get all pretentious about the layout or the music, but the food's great."

[[ for the kid. ]]

Comments

[suitably_heroic]

"Considering the name of this place, I'm gonna go with 'not the vegetables'," Atton said, "Which is the way I like it."

So there, Sparks!

"How's your other classes going, by the way? Learn how to bake meat yet?"

[myownface]

"Nah, but I'm pretty sure I could fake my way through a lasagna or something if I had to. You know, mix things up a bit, tomato sauce is totally a vegetable, sure."

Look, Sparkle was willing to concede defeat at least somewhat. It just meant that he was going to have to get creative with his tomato sauces. Maybe he'd bust out a blender...

"Doctor Lecter was out this week, though, so I had to cover. I guess, like, the school administration doesn't like when baking classes are being taught by venomous snakes? But it was the day everyone was just falling asleep so I had people microwave brownies."

[suitably_heroic]

Lasagna sounded like a good compromise. Atton probably wouldn't pitch a fit if he got home and there was lasagna. Unless it was suspiciously green-looking lasagna.

"Ugh, that day sucked," Atton muttered. "You know I conked out three times during a mission? It's a damn miracle nobody shot me."

Not so much a miracle as planning on the island's part, but Atton wasn't about to dignify it with, like, the benefit of the doubt. "Figures he's a snake, though."

[myownface]

"No getting shot," Sparkle decreed. "Still the rule."

It was an important rule, okay? Shot Attons were unhappy Attons. Unhappier than usual Attons? They made Sparkle sad, anyway.

"You really don't like him, do you?"

That was accompanied with a weird sort of upturn at the corner of his mouth, like he wasn't sure if he wanted to grin his way through that observation or frown or what.

[suitably_heroic]

"I don't know him well enough to know if I like him or not," Atton said. "I just know creepy when I see it. Snake-y. Doesn't make me want to go in and find out."

[myownface]

"Fair enough," Sparkle replied, biting the inside of his cheek as he looked down at his menu. "I guess maybe I just expect everyone to be a bit of a snake."

That much went without saying. And made sense enough coming from a kid with no real venom to bite back with. It still felt weird when referring to Doctor Lecter, though. He was one of the small, always surprising army of people on the island who consistently encouraged him to do better, instead of immediately brushing him off as street garbage.

"Hey, what was that juice you ordered for me that one time? The purple stuff? That was pretty good."

[suitably_heroic]

Sparkle knew the guy as the guy who rooted for him. Atton knew him as that teacher with the disturbingly familiar hollow charm, who once watched Atton eat a potato chip wrong with a look that screamed that potato chip is more important than you. And he'd known people who had charm like that, who threw looks like that when they thought you weren't looking; they'd all been Sith.

But he was happy to let the guy's deal be his deal, as long as he didn't have to be involved - or as long as the guy kept Sparkle out of it.

"There's idiots, there's selfish idiots, and then there's snakes," he said. "Big difference." He shook his head and glanced down at the menu. "Uh, purple juice-- either the non-alcoholic juma or, um..."

He squinted at the menu. "...That one, right. Sorry, it's been a while."

[myownface]

"Cool, thanks. I'll get that." And food. Sparkle needed to find food. That was pretty important on the list of things to do, considering they were in a restaurant, and all.

He pursed his lips a little at the menu, and then flipped back to the soup and sandwiches. He generally had pretty good luck with those.

"So... how do you tell the difference, then? If you want to know a snake before it's already bitten you, I mean. I used to think I'm pretty good at figuring it out, but... fuck, I don't even know anymore. I keep getting bit."

By hot guys with guns. By shop owners. Maybe everyone was a snake. It seemed like the safer way to go about looking at things.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton shrugged. "I have good instincts for that kind of thing. It might be the Force sensitivity, but I'm not sure."

Probably helped he'd been a snake once, too, come to think of it. But he'd been trying to cut out whatever vestigial parts of that part of his life remained for a while now.

"It's... take that Lecter guy. All charm, distinguished gentleman, blah blah," he said. "That stuff's easy. Charm is easy. For that matter: sleazy is easy. Hot and dangerous and mysterious and into you is easy. Easy to fake, and easy to use, because when people see it, they usually feel no incentive to look past it. They're either happy to be with you, or happy to be rid of you."

[myownface]

"It's weird when the ones with charm don't want to be rid of me," Sparkle noted, frowning. "Like, I don't know... maybe they're snakes, but it isn't like I have anything to offer them that'd make keeping me around worthwhile."

Except for the ones who waited until he gave them a reason to demand something from him, he supposed. He couldn't wait until he'd gotten that hard drive out of his life, until he was right back to not being beholden to anybody.

"So... what isn't easy? I mean, like, I can't even fucking tell. I'm a chameleon, chameleons don't look at purple and think about how hard it is when they see it. It's just, there, that thing is purple, that's what I gotta be, and then they're fucking purple."

And all of the snakes in Sparkle's life before Fandom had been the flashy kind, the brightly-coloured ones with spikes and spots and rattles that hissed and flared their hoods and made it really frigging clear that they were snakes. They weren't supposed to be chameleons too.

[suitably_heroic]

"Honesty's not easy," Atton said. "That's what gives these people away. Maybe one day you catch their eye and you realize they're looking at you like you're a pet, not another human being. Maybe there's a flash of intelligence there, right before they go back to staring at a girl's chest. Maybe they're clearly thinking too hard when they're shoving their hand down your pants, because they know you're not thinking too much."

He'd been one of the best chameleon-snakes Sith special forces had had, and Brianna had caught the way his muscle-memory grasped for Echani techniques anyway.

"You can hide everything a short span of the time, or you can hide most of it for a longer span of time, but you can't hide all of it all the time," he said. "You can fake honesty, but you have to work hard. Usually easier to put on a face that doesn't force you to have to play that one."

[myownface]

"Be a liar," Sparkle translated. "Be the kind of liar that everyone knows is a liar, and that way, when you lie to their faces, nobody's surprised. It's just background noise. And if it slips... shit, most people can't tell honesty from bullshit on a good day."

[suitably_heroic]

"Which is why charm works so well," Atton said, waving towards the four-armed waiter. "Charm's just lying with a positive PR spin. Nobody questions it because it makes them feel good, as long as it's pointed at them. So they assume the intention's good, even if the words might be a lie."

[myownface]

Sparkle nodded. Yeah, he'd known a few of those ones. Again, mostly recently. Again, mostly on the island. Lewis was still saving up for a house in a nice neighbourhood. You didn't get many of the charming types in the shitholes that they'd been set up in so far.

"Hell, even I can do charming when I need to. It's a smile and some pretty words and a nice suit." He poked at the menu as the waiter came up to them. "I'll have that to drink and whichever one of these sandwiches has the most nerf in it without needing like three people to carry it out. And the soup of the day looks good, I'll have that."

Which came already dead and wasn't likely to kill him. He'd checked! He was learning.

[suitably_heroic]

"Just get me a giant slab of nerf and what the kid's drinking," Atton told the waiter. He relaxed back in his seat.

"Anyway, the only advice I have on identifying snakes is attention to detail," he said. "Catch that one moment they slip, just for a second. And be wary of the charming, well-dressed ones." Beat. "Or get Force sensitive and then you have the joy of having something screeching NOT RIGHT, NOT RIGHT in your brain a lot."

[myownface]

"Oh, well, that part sounds great. Where do I sign up for that?"

Sparkle was pretty sure it didn't work that way, but hey, if it did, he'd be tempted. Be a space wizard. Almost get killed every other weekend for a living. Sounded like a great time.

[suitably_heroic]

"Two floors up and to the Temple," Atton said, with a snort. "Say 'may the Force be with you' five times and spin in a circle, it might work."

[myownface]

"If nothing else, at least it'd be amusing to see the look on people's faces when I do it."

Come on. Just picture Mical's reaction. Go on. It was worth taking a moment to envision.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton let out a little snicker. "And you would, too," he said. Fondly. "Watch out, Mical might start thinking you have it out for him."

The waiter stopped by and put both of their glasses down. Atton snagged his own, quickly enough, and tried not to think about the fact he was an - ugh - thirty-year-old man talking about pranking another grown man with a teenager. Stupid birthdays wrecked everything.

[myownface]

Pfft, if thirty was too old for pranks, Sparkle hoped he died young doing something reckless like glitterbombing Skywalker again.

His final words would be, 'Worth it.'

"What, don't I?" He reached for his own glass and gave Atton a grin. "Thirsty?"

[suitably_heroic]

Atton rolled his eyes and took a sip of his drink. "No, just reminded I'm getting old," he muttered grudgingly.

[myownface]

See Sparkle. See Sparkle lean forward a little, raising his eyebrows.

"Getting old? Oh, shit, is someone having a birthday today? Is that what's up? I don't need to like get up on a table and sing you a birthday song or anything do I?"

He would! He could! Sparkle was very good at those!

[suitably_heroic]

Ugh. See, this is why he should never talk about stuff like honesty to people at a time like this. It made him say honesty-adjacent things. And then people got things. And then Sparkle Sparkled all over it.

"Don't you even dare," Atton muttered, thumping his head against the table. "I'll choke you to death with your own backpack."

[myownface]

"Okay, okay, easy man," Sparkle replied, easing back a little and, so help him, hunkering a bit possessively over that bag of his. It was his precious, Atton. Nobody messed with the bag, even when it didn't have incriminating stolen goods in it (which was, admittedly, a rare thing) that could potentially get him off the hook on serving jail time or getting his ass deported back to Canada or something (which happened far less often). "It's not even that big a deal, is it? Like, getting older, go you, you managed to make it this long and still be not dead."

[suitably_heroic]

"I'm thirty today," Atton muttered. "Pretty sure that doesn't make any kind of sense whatsoever. How the hells did I make thirty?"

He noticed the hunkering, but he didn't think much of it. Maybe he might have if Sparkle hadn't been Sparkle, but he wasn't quite as primed around the kid these days as he was around most people.