A Little Less Conversation
Title:
Characters: Ben/Vestara, Luke
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Implied boinking (I'm using this way too much lately...)
Summary: Five times Ship attempted to get Ben and Vestara to hook up, and one time it succeeded.
1.
Ben held out his lightsaber ahead of him, lighting the interior of Ship. "Think you can at least turn on the lights?" he asked Ship. All he got was an amused, dismissive feeling--and a sudden jolt forward as Vestara ran into his back.
"Why is there no light?"
"Ship is being cranky," he replied, turning and steadying her. "Careful. Nobody likes a clumsy Sith."
She gave him a sidelong look, then looked around them. "You simply need a strong will to handle--"
Suddenly Ship rocked as if it'd been hit. They both lost their balance, tilting this way and that, grabbing onto each other to try and steady themselves, and at last toppling over entirely. The air left Ben's lungs as his back slammed against the side of Ship, and again as Vestara collided hard with his chest. His grip tightened on her so she didn't go flying off around the cabin again and get hurt.
And then the shuddering stopped, just as fast as it had started, and left the two of them panting, hearts racing. Thumbing his comlink, Ben leaned a little more over Vestara's shoulder to get his wrist closer. "Dad?" he called. "What just hit Ship?"
Vestara coughed; the impact must have knocked her breathless too. "I think..."
Ben pulled back and found himself close--very close--to her face. For a moment, something passed between them, charged like an ion beam. Their hearts picked up in pace again. Vestara licked her lips, tilted her chin a bit. In the thin glow that came in through the viewport, Ben could see she was looking at him almost expectantly, and he knew what she wanted and he wanted it too...
"Ben? Nothing hit Ship. What's going on over there?"
They sprang apart as if Luke had walked into the cabin in person. Vestara half-turned away, and Ben took a moment to watch her, wishing they hadn't been interrupted.
"Ben?"
He sighed, and raised his wrist. Whatever that had been, it could wait.
2.
"So what now?"
Vestara looked up from where she was turning her father's lightsaber over in her hands. She had been studying the wider galaxy's experiences with Sith, and had found that most of their ideals agreed; Sith, even those of the Tribe, did not generally mourn or feel loss. It simply wasn't what they valued. And yet, she felt something, now that her father was gone, consumed in this ever-growing battle against Abeloth. "I do not know," she said, slipping the weapon back into its slot on her belt, opposite her own. "The path is unclear from here."
Ben came and sat beside her on the crates in the hold. On one side, the Jade Shadow gleamed, its hull freshly cleaned and its own stores restocked; on the other side, Ship was almost malevolently glaring at the vessel that had once been his mother's pride. But when he mentally queried the Sith vessel, all he got was disinterest, or perhaps sleepiness. Did Sith meditation spheres need sleep?
Either way, they were all getting a breather in one of the landing bays on the Errant Venture. As he had many times before, Booster Terrik had offered the Skywalkers and their dubious allies a lift, and, bone-weary, they'd all taken it without complaint. The Sith vessels all had little more than skeleton crews that kept an eye on things while in hyperspace. Almost everyone was on board here.
"Well, that's what they brought us along for," Ben said. Something in his stomach twisted a bit. This was the most vulnerable--truthfully vulnerable, not faking it--that he'd seen Vestara, and he didn't like it. "We're the ones with all the ideas. Youth, and all that."
She smiled a little, although it could have just been the way she looked with that scar. "You are so humorous, Ben. How do you do it, in the face of what we have against us?"
Ben shrugged, stretching out his shoulders when the motion tugged on tense muscles. "My father would probably say something Jedi-like. I just say it's how I've learned to deal with it."
"How do I learn to deal with it?"
He went to put his hand down on the cloth-covered crate, and instead his fingers met a warm hand. Somehow, he'd always expected Vestara's hands to be colder.
That made him think about when they'd been clearing Ship for departure from the Maw, and that strange tremor, and the way Vestara had felt leaning against him. As a Jedi, he knew he was bound to oppose the Sith and all they stood for, and yet he kept finding reasons not to oppose Vestara.
That, and his father still didn't like the two of them being alone. So that only added another incentive for Ben to keep his hand right where it was.
"I guess you just have to figure out your own path," he said.
*
Ship grumbled to itself. Not even close that time; what good were teenage hormones if they couldn't be manipulated properly?
Perhaps, Ship thought, it was losing its edge.
It would try harder next time.
3.
Vestara looked on in amusement as Ben swore long and colorfully under his breath, wiping a spray of engine lubricant off his face. "Kriffing derelict," he muttered, kicking the rusted speeder bike where it rested on antigrav units in the maintenance bay. "Kriffing Maw. Kriffing Abeloth!"
"I thought Jedi were not predisposed to such shows of annoyance," Vestara said. Ben gave her a long look.
"Sometimes we forget all the little rules," he snapped, and slid back under the housing. She bit her lip, but the smile crept out, and mentally the Sith apprentice berated herself. Getting in too deep, she thought. Soon you'll be no better than these soft Jedi. But at the moment, she didn't mind much. Ben had stripped off most of the clothing on his upper torso, and it was hot in the maintenance bay. The orange sphere of Ship wavered a little in the heat.
"You'd think they'd tune the environmental controls better," Ben grumbled.
"I believe you nearly have it adjusted properly," Vestara said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone of voice. She was new at some of these emotions. "Then we can retire to more properly controlled areas."
"Why do you speak like that, anyway?"
"Like what?" Vestara grabbed the bottle of water that she'd had the foresight to take down from the galley with her and took a long pull. Why was it so hot?
"Like someone out of a historical holo--kiff!"
The hydrospanner he'd been working with had slipped from his fingers, clocked him in the forehead right above his eye, and clattered off across the deck, rolling to a stop several meters away. Ben slid out from under the speeder and huffed in annoyance. Rolling her eyes, Vestara leaned across him, examining the small split in the skin the collision of forehead and tool had caused.
"There is no reason to complain," she told him briskly. "It's barely a scratch. Your skull is quite hard enough to withstand the impact, in any case."
When Ben didn't reply, but his presence was still with focus, Vestara looked down to see what he was looking at that was so interesting, and was rather pleased to discover it was her. Ben's eyes were blue, flecked with darker shades of blue. She'd never been close enough to see that before. And she'd never touched his face before, but she took the opportunity now. Ever an opportunist; that was the way of the Sith. And Ben's skin was well worth touching.
So was hers, because he reached up with a grease-stained hand and trailed fingers inexpertly along her jaw. They shook, a little, and the part of her mind that had been trained to this sort of seduction made a sound of disapproval. But whatever made his hand shake, his eyes showed none of it. They were all decisiveness and curiosity, and desire.
Ben, Vestara thought a moment later, was an exceptionally good kisser, despite his obvious inexperience.
A rumble from elsewhere in the bay made them break the kiss and look up, Ben craning his neck to look over the tattered seat of the speeder. Ship had extended its ramp down to the deck, the opening dark.
"I guess we offended it," he said, then turned back to look at Vestara, different emotions flitting across his face. "And I guess we shouldn't have done that."
She sighed and backed away, standing. "No, I suppose we should not have. My apolo--"
"Don't say it, Ves."
Ben was smiling at her, and Vestara raised a brow. They looked at each other for a moment. Vestara was the first to smile.
*
Meanwhile, Ship was beginning to think it would have to resort to drastic measures. What was wrong with these two?
4.
Ben sat alone, leaning against one of the Shadow's landing skids, feeling empty.
Logically, he knew his father wasn't invincible. One day, Luke Skywalker would meet his match. Apparently he had. And he'd paid the price. And when Ben hadn't been able to take the sight of his father hooked up to so many machines, looking small and frail for the first time since Ben could remember, he'd come down here.
He'd been halfway up the Shadow's ramp when he'd realized he didn't want to go inside, and in fact the thought of sitting inside the ship that had been their home for so long made the teen physically ill. So instead he'd curled up here, staring at Ship staring unblinkingly back at him, and trying not to think too much about the medics whispering that his father had lost a lot of blood, that the damage would take a long time in a bacta tank to repair--a long time that they didn't have.
"Credit for your thoughts?"
Ben looked up. "Not now, Vestara."
She sat beside him anyway. "I'm getting better at learning the idioms spoken in the rest of the galaxy," she said. "It's always good to learn how to blend in, yes?"
"I said, not now."
Vestara ignored him. "That's what I was told to do, you know--act, make you give in to your attraction to me, perhaps even fall... and I wanted it. I do want it, still. But--"
"Didn't you hear me?" Ben stood up, turning his back on her. "I don't want the mind games right now. I don't want you toying with me like we're playing some kind of sick game of predator-and-prey. I don't want any of this right now." She watched him look down at his feet. "I wish my father had never been exiled."
Vestara watched him. Growing up, such displays of crass emotion had been discouraged, unless they were feigned to throw one's enemies off. She had been around Ben long enough to know that he would never fake such an outburst. "Will you be quiet and listen, or will you continue to mope?"
He made an exasperated sound, but didn't leave, and Vestara took that as her cue.
"But," she picked up, walking around him so she could face him. "That is no longer my motivation."
He looked at her steadily, eyes red-rimmed. "What is?"
Standing up on tiptoe, Vestara kissed him, and was pleased when he melted to her touch. "This is," she said, when she had pulled away.
"No loyalty among Sith?"
"We are made to be flexible."
A familiar rumble made them both look over at Ship, which had extended its ramp once more.
"Ship has been taking the initiative far too much lately," Vestara mused. Her fingers found and grasped Ben's hand.
"I think we should check it out," he replied, as they walked over briskly. "Although I don't know how to perform maintenance on a sentient ship."
Vestara grinned as she led him up the ramp, and Ship closed behind them. "I think you'll manage."
5.
Humans, Ship decided, were strange creatures.
It had had thousands of years on this pair and had long since decided that, of course, but Ben Skywalker and Vestara Khai were exemplars of the idea. Even now, several weeks after their first (and very exciting) encounter, they'd only copulated a handful of times. This puzzled Ship. A human male, after finding a mate and failing to impregnate her, should logically wish to continue attempts. Right?
"Don't think too hard, Ship."
Ben stood inside Ship. Its internal senses told it that he was grinning.
I am confused, it admitted. You humans are a strange species, spending so much energy in courtship and yet barely reaping the rewards.
"You need to update your databases," Ben said. A crate levitated in from outside, and Ben put it neatly to one side. Ship checked its external visuals; Vestara was outside, passing the crates in. "Relationships among humans aren't all about sex."
"He would be remiss if he'd said otherwise," Vestara muttered. Ship's audio pickup was sensitive enough to hear it. Ben had apparently heard it too, because he smiled at her.
"And you need to try harder with the next pair you attempt matchmaking with."
You were aware of my influence?
"From the very beginning. You're a lousy liar. That tremor when nothing was around? I'm a Jedi, not a moron."
"And if he was, I am Sith," Vestara added. "I've trained from birth to recognize subterfuge."
"Nice," Ben shot at her. She smiled sweetly.
I will take that into consideration. Although I admit, my original goal of using Vestara to corrupt you and bring you to the Dark Side had to become... flexible.
That sparked something in the two teenagers, because their grins shifted into something else as they looked at each other.
"I think we can finish this loading up later on," Vestara said, climbing the ramp. Ben took her hand.
"I think you're right. Ship--"
The ramp was already closing, and they both felt amusement pouring off the Sith vessel again. Ben rolled his eyes as he kicked one of his boots off and sent it flying across to hit the wall.
"A little privacy?"
Characters: Ben/Vestara, Luke
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Implied boinking (I'm using this way too much lately...)
Summary: Five times Ship attempted to get Ben and Vestara to hook up, and one time it succeeded.
1.
Ben held out his lightsaber ahead of him, lighting the interior of Ship. "Think you can at least turn on the lights?" he asked Ship. All he got was an amused, dismissive feeling--and a sudden jolt forward as Vestara ran into his back.
"Why is there no light?"
"Ship is being cranky," he replied, turning and steadying her. "Careful. Nobody likes a clumsy Sith."
She gave him a sidelong look, then looked around them. "You simply need a strong will to handle--"
Suddenly Ship rocked as if it'd been hit. They both lost their balance, tilting this way and that, grabbing onto each other to try and steady themselves, and at last toppling over entirely. The air left Ben's lungs as his back slammed against the side of Ship, and again as Vestara collided hard with his chest. His grip tightened on her so she didn't go flying off around the cabin again and get hurt.
And then the shuddering stopped, just as fast as it had started, and left the two of them panting, hearts racing. Thumbing his comlink, Ben leaned a little more over Vestara's shoulder to get his wrist closer. "Dad?" he called. "What just hit Ship?"
Vestara coughed; the impact must have knocked her breathless too. "I think..."
Ben pulled back and found himself close--very close--to her face. For a moment, something passed between them, charged like an ion beam. Their hearts picked up in pace again. Vestara licked her lips, tilted her chin a bit. In the thin glow that came in through the viewport, Ben could see she was looking at him almost expectantly, and he knew what she wanted and he wanted it too...
"Ben? Nothing hit Ship. What's going on over there?"
They sprang apart as if Luke had walked into the cabin in person. Vestara half-turned away, and Ben took a moment to watch her, wishing they hadn't been interrupted.
"Ben?"
He sighed, and raised his wrist. Whatever that had been, it could wait.
2.
"So what now?"
Vestara looked up from where she was turning her father's lightsaber over in her hands. She had been studying the wider galaxy's experiences with Sith, and had found that most of their ideals agreed; Sith, even those of the Tribe, did not generally mourn or feel loss. It simply wasn't what they valued. And yet, she felt something, now that her father was gone, consumed in this ever-growing battle against Abeloth. "I do not know," she said, slipping the weapon back into its slot on her belt, opposite her own. "The path is unclear from here."
Ben came and sat beside her on the crates in the hold. On one side, the Jade Shadow gleamed, its hull freshly cleaned and its own stores restocked; on the other side, Ship was almost malevolently glaring at the vessel that had once been his mother's pride. But when he mentally queried the Sith vessel, all he got was disinterest, or perhaps sleepiness. Did Sith meditation spheres need sleep?
Either way, they were all getting a breather in one of the landing bays on the Errant Venture. As he had many times before, Booster Terrik had offered the Skywalkers and their dubious allies a lift, and, bone-weary, they'd all taken it without complaint. The Sith vessels all had little more than skeleton crews that kept an eye on things while in hyperspace. Almost everyone was on board here.
"Well, that's what they brought us along for," Ben said. Something in his stomach twisted a bit. This was the most vulnerable--truthfully vulnerable, not faking it--that he'd seen Vestara, and he didn't like it. "We're the ones with all the ideas. Youth, and all that."
She smiled a little, although it could have just been the way she looked with that scar. "You are so humorous, Ben. How do you do it, in the face of what we have against us?"
Ben shrugged, stretching out his shoulders when the motion tugged on tense muscles. "My father would probably say something Jedi-like. I just say it's how I've learned to deal with it."
"How do I learn to deal with it?"
He went to put his hand down on the cloth-covered crate, and instead his fingers met a warm hand. Somehow, he'd always expected Vestara's hands to be colder.
That made him think about when they'd been clearing Ship for departure from the Maw, and that strange tremor, and the way Vestara had felt leaning against him. As a Jedi, he knew he was bound to oppose the Sith and all they stood for, and yet he kept finding reasons not to oppose Vestara.
That, and his father still didn't like the two of them being alone. So that only added another incentive for Ben to keep his hand right where it was.
"I guess you just have to figure out your own path," he said.
*
Ship grumbled to itself. Not even close that time; what good were teenage hormones if they couldn't be manipulated properly?
Perhaps, Ship thought, it was losing its edge.
It would try harder next time.
3.
Vestara looked on in amusement as Ben swore long and colorfully under his breath, wiping a spray of engine lubricant off his face. "Kriffing derelict," he muttered, kicking the rusted speeder bike where it rested on antigrav units in the maintenance bay. "Kriffing Maw. Kriffing Abeloth!"
"I thought Jedi were not predisposed to such shows of annoyance," Vestara said. Ben gave her a long look.
"Sometimes we forget all the little rules," he snapped, and slid back under the housing. She bit her lip, but the smile crept out, and mentally the Sith apprentice berated herself. Getting in too deep, she thought. Soon you'll be no better than these soft Jedi. But at the moment, she didn't mind much. Ben had stripped off most of the clothing on his upper torso, and it was hot in the maintenance bay. The orange sphere of Ship wavered a little in the heat.
"You'd think they'd tune the environmental controls better," Ben grumbled.
"I believe you nearly have it adjusted properly," Vestara said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone of voice. She was new at some of these emotions. "Then we can retire to more properly controlled areas."
"Why do you speak like that, anyway?"
"Like what?" Vestara grabbed the bottle of water that she'd had the foresight to take down from the galley with her and took a long pull. Why was it so hot?
"Like someone out of a historical holo--kiff!"
The hydrospanner he'd been working with had slipped from his fingers, clocked him in the forehead right above his eye, and clattered off across the deck, rolling to a stop several meters away. Ben slid out from under the speeder and huffed in annoyance. Rolling her eyes, Vestara leaned across him, examining the small split in the skin the collision of forehead and tool had caused.
"There is no reason to complain," she told him briskly. "It's barely a scratch. Your skull is quite hard enough to withstand the impact, in any case."
When Ben didn't reply, but his presence was still with focus, Vestara looked down to see what he was looking at that was so interesting, and was rather pleased to discover it was her. Ben's eyes were blue, flecked with darker shades of blue. She'd never been close enough to see that before. And she'd never touched his face before, but she took the opportunity now. Ever an opportunist; that was the way of the Sith. And Ben's skin was well worth touching.
So was hers, because he reached up with a grease-stained hand and trailed fingers inexpertly along her jaw. They shook, a little, and the part of her mind that had been trained to this sort of seduction made a sound of disapproval. But whatever made his hand shake, his eyes showed none of it. They were all decisiveness and curiosity, and desire.
Ben, Vestara thought a moment later, was an exceptionally good kisser, despite his obvious inexperience.
A rumble from elsewhere in the bay made them break the kiss and look up, Ben craning his neck to look over the tattered seat of the speeder. Ship had extended its ramp down to the deck, the opening dark.
"I guess we offended it," he said, then turned back to look at Vestara, different emotions flitting across his face. "And I guess we shouldn't have done that."
She sighed and backed away, standing. "No, I suppose we should not have. My apolo--"
"Don't say it, Ves."
Ben was smiling at her, and Vestara raised a brow. They looked at each other for a moment. Vestara was the first to smile.
*
Meanwhile, Ship was beginning to think it would have to resort to drastic measures. What was wrong with these two?
4.
Ben sat alone, leaning against one of the Shadow's landing skids, feeling empty.
Logically, he knew his father wasn't invincible. One day, Luke Skywalker would meet his match. Apparently he had. And he'd paid the price. And when Ben hadn't been able to take the sight of his father hooked up to so many machines, looking small and frail for the first time since Ben could remember, he'd come down here.
He'd been halfway up the Shadow's ramp when he'd realized he didn't want to go inside, and in fact the thought of sitting inside the ship that had been their home for so long made the teen physically ill. So instead he'd curled up here, staring at Ship staring unblinkingly back at him, and trying not to think too much about the medics whispering that his father had lost a lot of blood, that the damage would take a long time in a bacta tank to repair--a long time that they didn't have.
"Credit for your thoughts?"
Ben looked up. "Not now, Vestara."
She sat beside him anyway. "I'm getting better at learning the idioms spoken in the rest of the galaxy," she said. "It's always good to learn how to blend in, yes?"
"I said, not now."
Vestara ignored him. "That's what I was told to do, you know--act, make you give in to your attraction to me, perhaps even fall... and I wanted it. I do want it, still. But--"
"Didn't you hear me?" Ben stood up, turning his back on her. "I don't want the mind games right now. I don't want you toying with me like we're playing some kind of sick game of predator-and-prey. I don't want any of this right now." She watched him look down at his feet. "I wish my father had never been exiled."
Vestara watched him. Growing up, such displays of crass emotion had been discouraged, unless they were feigned to throw one's enemies off. She had been around Ben long enough to know that he would never fake such an outburst. "Will you be quiet and listen, or will you continue to mope?"
He made an exasperated sound, but didn't leave, and Vestara took that as her cue.
"But," she picked up, walking around him so she could face him. "That is no longer my motivation."
He looked at her steadily, eyes red-rimmed. "What is?"
Standing up on tiptoe, Vestara kissed him, and was pleased when he melted to her touch. "This is," she said, when she had pulled away.
"No loyalty among Sith?"
"We are made to be flexible."
A familiar rumble made them both look over at Ship, which had extended its ramp once more.
"Ship has been taking the initiative far too much lately," Vestara mused. Her fingers found and grasped Ben's hand.
"I think we should check it out," he replied, as they walked over briskly. "Although I don't know how to perform maintenance on a sentient ship."
Vestara grinned as she led him up the ramp, and Ship closed behind them. "I think you'll manage."
5.
Humans, Ship decided, were strange creatures.
It had had thousands of years on this pair and had long since decided that, of course, but Ben Skywalker and Vestara Khai were exemplars of the idea. Even now, several weeks after their first (and very exciting) encounter, they'd only copulated a handful of times. This puzzled Ship. A human male, after finding a mate and failing to impregnate her, should logically wish to continue attempts. Right?
"Don't think too hard, Ship."
Ben stood inside Ship. Its internal senses told it that he was grinning.
I am confused, it admitted. You humans are a strange species, spending so much energy in courtship and yet barely reaping the rewards.
"You need to update your databases," Ben said. A crate levitated in from outside, and Ben put it neatly to one side. Ship checked its external visuals; Vestara was outside, passing the crates in. "Relationships among humans aren't all about sex."
"He would be remiss if he'd said otherwise," Vestara muttered. Ship's audio pickup was sensitive enough to hear it. Ben had apparently heard it too, because he smiled at her.
"And you need to try harder with the next pair you attempt matchmaking with."
You were aware of my influence?
"From the very beginning. You're a lousy liar. That tremor when nothing was around? I'm a Jedi, not a moron."
"And if he was, I am Sith," Vestara added. "I've trained from birth to recognize subterfuge."
"Nice," Ben shot at her. She smiled sweetly.
I will take that into consideration. Although I admit, my original goal of using Vestara to corrupt you and bring you to the Dark Side had to become... flexible.
That sparked something in the two teenagers, because their grins shifted into something else as they looked at each other.
"I think we can finish this loading up later on," Vestara said, climbing the ramp. Ben took her hand.
"I think you're right. Ship--"
The ramp was already closing, and they both felt amusement pouring off the Sith vessel again. Ben rolled his eyes as he kicked one of his boots off and sent it flying across to hit the wall.
"A little privacy?"