I'm good at shooting people, cracking wise, and pretending to know how to fight.

Atton hated coming back here.

This apartment had been home for such a long time, and now it wasn't. Didn't have one to trade for it either. The Temple wasn't home. Sia's wasn't home. That old spaceship sitting on the roof, that came closer, but it still wasn't it.

Coming here was a reminder that Atton was homeless.

But he had to come back here sometime. Clean out his things, what little of them they owned. So... he did, letting the door open with a creak. Resisting the urge to let it sink in, he padded through the living room and into his bedroom. Nothing there held any particular sentimental value, but there were kolto patches and books and other supplies.

He packed those up quickly.

He moved on to the kitchen, where he took every stinking, disgusting item from the fridge and junked it. He hesitated, for a moment, over an old pack of Sparkle's shitty beer, but he junked that too. Took the whiskey from the cabinet, though. Might be useful.

Were the boards creaking under his feet on his way to Sparkle's? Had to be a figment of his imagination. Some of Sparks' stuff had made it to Canada before Sparkle had-- yeah. But not all of it.

And okay, maybe it was intense optimism that had him packing up the remainder of it, forcing himself not to linger over a cat plush or a stupid note or anything. Maybe Sparkle was going to need it some day. Who knew?

Really, Atton just didn't want to throw it out.

With boxes in hand, he walked back into the living room, and... paused. "Oh, of course you're still alive," he muttered.

Upstairs, he set Pauline down in an unused spot on the dashboard in the cockpit. Jaunty hat and all. "Not gonna buy you a new one," he informed the plant.

Silence followed.

Silence was everywhere.

Atton brought his hand up to his face. Just blocking out the light. Nothing else going on up there.

Honest.

[[ establishy ]]

So Visas's apprentice was a full Jedi now, and Atton... had no idea how he felt about it. Had they rushed the kid to replace Mira? Or was that just his imagination, the crushing guilt, messing with him?

... Anyway, as Atton came down from the parking spot upstairs, he realized he was glad to be home for a moment. Maybe over here he wouldn't have to think about it.

He sighed, fiddled with his keys, and finally shoved open the door.

"Space, I hope House Hunters is back on."

[[ open! ]]

Okay, Atton couldn't say he was wild about finding out that Sparkle had some issues regarding him not being around from Sparkle's nosy boyfriend instead of Sparks himself. He'd make a point out of getting grumpy about it some time after the whole thing got fixed.

For now, he'd informed Mical that he could take care of the three-day diplomatic event by himself, he was a trained diplomat and Atton most pointedly was not. That left him with some time to hang around the island, talk to Sparkle a little, get the worst settled, the works.

That was the plan, anyway.

Waking up on Monday morning with an itch in the back of his head that bounced off of an awakening itch all over the island? That had not been in the plans.

"Oh, space," he grumbled, as he stood in the kitchen and the first hit of coffee smacked him upside the head. "Please just be last night's meatloaf."

[[ open! ]]

The sun had been up in the sky for quite a while by the time Atton left his bedroom. He stumbled into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.

Those retching noises weren't the nicest he'd ever made.

He left the bathroom, took a swig of water on the way, stumbled back into his bedroom. He yanked the covers over his head. And then the pillows, too.

That was it for him for the rest of the day.

[[ establishy, though open if you want to yell at a closed door or something ]]

See, the upside of having Force senses was that, about fifteen minutes before anyone got on the air and said anything about any hurricanes, you could look out the window, wince, and say...

"I've got a bad feeling about this."

Atton sighed and turned around. "Better check if the emergency stash is still intact," he muttered to himself.

Because of course there was an emergency stash. There were at least five. What was he, stupid?

... don't answer that.

[[ can be open ]]

Atton was still tired. He was pretty sure he was going to stay tired until the month was over and he could finally move the hell on with his life.

But he was home now, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. This time, he found his keys before he woke up half the floor, opened the front door, and pushed in. He was trying to stay quiet - he wasn't sure if Sparkle was asleep and he didn't have the energy to use the Force to check.

It was nice to be home, though. As he put down the duffel and looked at the living room which - despite his best efforts for years - had finally started to crowd up with furniture and plants and stuff, he had to acknowledge that. Both that it was nice, and that it was home.

It felt like relief.

[[ for the other guy who lives here, if he wants. otherwise establishy. ]]

It was a perfectly ordinary day.

Atton had gone up to the ship, he'd yelled at his astromech, he'd poked fruitlessly at stuff he'd fixed like five times before and didn't actually need any further work, and then he'd come back downstairs to drown his face in coffee. Perfectly. Ordinary.

If he was lucky, Sparkle'd forgotten all about last year, and the day could go off without a hitch in its perfectly ordinary ordinari... hood? Was that a word?

"I need more coffee," Atton decided, walking briskly into the kitchen.

He was a perfectly ordinary person having perfectly ordinary coffee on a day that was not, in any way, shape or form, remotely anything like his birthday.

( In which it is not at all Atton's birthday today. Seriously. )

[[ open but a little slow today! ]]

Atton's phone had been ringing since before the radio thing went down, but at least now he knew more or less what was going on. Ugh. This thing again.

He trudged into the apartment late into the afternoon, snow tumbling off of his jacket every time he moved. There was a chunk of it wedged in his hair right above his eyebrow, too. Frankly, at this point, it was a worse pain-in-the-ass than the calling. "Sparkle!" he barked. "There's booze on the table!"

After a moment's thought, he balanced the phone on top of the bottle of mediocre whiskey. Then he trudged into the bathroom where he ran the hot water for a unspeakably long time. "Ugh."

[[ can be open, sure! ]]

So Sparkle was out for the night, and it'd been a while since Atton caught up with whatever Anakin was doing (probably being yelled at by children and yelling at other children to make up for it). Seemed like it was the right time for a 'hey, we survived the first week of the new semester' drink.

Of course, Anakin drank like a smuggler who hadn't seen a cantina in ten years, so there were three new bottles of whiskey sitting in Atton's kitchen. There was no way he was wasting precious juma on this one. Atton poured himself a glass of the juma and sat down in the chair, careful not to bump his still-sore arm into it. Going by Anakin's Force-presence, he figured he had about a minute or two before his door was getting - metaphorically, hopefully - kicked in.

He sighed.

[[ for one, and then another. some minor ocd up ahead. ]]

It had been a long day.

It had been a very long weekend, actually, so don't mind Atton if he burst into his apartment and started rummaging around for some kolto patches right away. He figured Sparkle was at the party thing anyway, and damn, he had to keep his shields locked up tight not to let the worst of the island slip into his head.

He wasn't that great at shield control was it was.

So he ignored the imagery: Mira encased by explosions, Mical with a hole in his head, Visas on the ground on some volcano planet somewhere. Whatever, island. You do your thing.

"Atton.."

He paused, hands still well into the medic's bag. "No," he said flatly.

"The prisoner holds the darkness at bay," Meetra whispered, "He will be lost inside it for three hundred years. His strength will fail. Then he will--"

"No," he repeated, holding up his hand, palm-first. "We're not... we're not doing this Jedi thing, I'm not, I don't-- don't make this about somebody else. You're around often enough, I just-- please don't."

"Atton," she repeated.

He sighed. She vanished. It was worse.

[[ can be open. some of meetra's words stolen from star wars: the old republic. ]]