The Drunk Side
Title: The Drunk Side
or: The Bar At The End Of The Galaxy
or: Two Jedi And An Ex-Sith Lord Walk Into A Bar
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Alek Squinquargesimus/Malak, Anakin Skywalker, Canderous Ordo, Darth Vader, Exile/Gavril Tal-Allein, Jolee Bindo, Obi-Wan Kenobi (mentioned), Padme Amidala (mentioned), Revan/Eran Cathael.
Summary: Extreme crack. Anakin is annoyed about how long it takes to become a Master, and goes bar-hopping, all around Coruscant. It turns out Anakin isn’t the only one drinking.
Note: Very, very cracky. May have a Ghostbusters reference. Also, plenty of cameos from minor characters that haven't been mentioned.
Deus Ex Mandalorian belongs firmly to estora , who coined the term. One Eddie Izzard quote in there, and a bit of swearing.
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A long time ago in a bar far, far away…
In the end, there was really only so many times Padme Amidala could listen to Anakin complain about being denied Mastery (Mastership? Masterhood? What did the Jedi call it, anyway?) before she turned him out and firmly told him that Jedi Temple matters stayed out of their shared bed.
She also imagined a paper bag over Anakin’s head - one of the brown, crinkly paper-filament kinds that one could still get in the seedier districts of Coruscant - with holes cut out for his eyes, although she’d never told him that. Anakin’s pout was a bit of a weapon. There were several variations: the ‘Why Can’t We Get A Fluffkit, Padme?’, the ‘But I Want To Eat Corellian Fritters’, and the ‘Are You Sure You Don’t Want To Have Sex Tonight?’ pouts were probably the most prominent among them. But this time, she managed to stay firm, and so Anakin Skywalker, Chosen One, Jedi Knight, and the Hero Without Fear found himself out on the streets, hitting nightclub after bar after nightclub, and wondering gloomily if the Universe was conspiring against him, because upon seeing his ID, the bouncers had told him that Jedi weren’t allowed in nightclubs now, courtesy of a visit from Master Yoda.
Anakin pondered the net Dark Side effects of killing the bouncer, or using a mind-trick on the bouncer, but eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He’d have to do something good after that, like hug fluffkits or give little children free candy in order to nullify the effects of his Dark Side shift.
Add maybe seven bouncers later and Anakin was torn between resentful admiration of how the little green troll got around, and wondering if Jedi Council members had a special ID that he could borrow to sneak into a bar. In particular, Obi-Wan’s.
That, at any rate, was how Anakin found himself sandwiched between a tall man who looked vaguely like Obi-Wan Kenobi (the hair and the beard, at any rate, because Obi-Wan didn’t have green eyes, wasn’t that tall, and wouldn’t be caught dead sneaking into bars at unholy hours with his former Padawan) and a man with pale-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, a blocky, squarish sort of jaw, and a face which looked like he had some sort of close encounter with the rear end of a speeder.
(Or, as Anakin privately believed, he’d looked like the business end of a Hutt. Force, he didn’t know anyone could be so ugly.)
He must have been on his third or fourth Tarisian ale, plus or minus two or five, the margin wasn’t that big, and complaining about life as a Jedi while downing Tarisian ales like water. (The fact that he was probably very drunk, or at least getting there had something to do with it.)
The Obi-Wan lookalike made the occasional reassuring sound, because anyone who wanted to antagonise a drunk Jedi who was waving the hilt of his lightsaber about and using it to emphasize his slurred statements was probably tired of living, very stupid, or extremely capable of handling themselves. Strangely enough, the last category had the least people. Most of them were dead.
It was also the kind of sound one makes to an almost-stranger telling you that Master Yoda was a hairless baby Wookie from Kashyyyk (“they shaved him, I’m telling you!”) and that his height was the result of stunted growth due to issues with his growth hormones. It was the kind of slightly awkward conversation that the Obi-Wan lookalike was too polite (and too attached to his Tarisian ale, for he was perfectly capable of handling a Jedi) to get out of. Ugly Square Jaw, on the other hand, was a lot more direct and further gone.
“Oh, shut up,” he snapped.
When Anakin did, in fact, shut up, it was more out of shock, and a reflexive response to a tone that expected and demanded instant obedience than anything else. It was also because a Pavlovian corner of Anakin’s brain commonly associated Square Jaw’s tone with an aggravated Mace Windu. “Grow up. What are you, a Padawan?”
“Actually,” Anakin half-slurred, huffily (secretly proud of the way he’d managed to channel Obi-Wan’s tone of Icy Disapproval), “I’m a Jedi Knight. Padawan Learners have braids.” The last part of his statement was smugly matter-of-fact.
“They Knighted you?” Square Jaw snorted. His pale blue eyes scrutinised Anakin, with all the emotion of a bantha’s rear end. “Their standards are dropping.”
“Oi! Squint!” The Obi-Wan lookalike yelled, to no one in particular that Anakin could see. “He’s starting again!”
“What did you do, whine at your Master until he’d thought he’d get rid of you by Knighting you?”
“I fought on Praesitlyn,” Anakin retorted hotly, feeling a dull anger course through his veins.
“They’re giving out Knighthoods like porn holo-mags these days,” Square Jaw said, and his eyes glittered bitterly. “In my day, I had to go kill a Sith Lord, save the kriffing galazy, and almost get killed by an elite Jedi strike team before Vandar made me a kriffing Knight!” his voice was rising in aggravation. “I should have just stayed with the Dark Side! At least the Sith let you have your position immediately!”
“Sorry about that,” someone else said, distracting Anakin, and cutting through Square Jaw’s rant. That someone else happened to be another tall man, bald, with his bare skull tattooed in a pattern that somehow reminded Anakin of Asajj Ventress, and he let out a yelp and tried to draw his lightsaber and jump into a fighting stance, all at once. Only he’d already drawn his lightsaber hilt, and he’d tangled his legs in the bar stool somehow, so he ended up making an undignified yelp and tripping over and finding himself on the floor.
“Need any help?” Bald Not-Ventress asked, holding out a hand. Anakin stared at it. His drink-fogged mind roughly thought about it and decided that the bald guy wasn’t so bad after all and maybe he was sort of nice. He found his lightsaber hooked back onto his belt and got back onto his feet. Obi-Wan lookalike was slapping him on the back.
“Hey, watch yourself, man. The Tarisian ale’s pretty strong.”
“I can handle it,” Anakin slurred, figuring that however his lightsaber had gotten back on his belt, it was probably a good thing. He tried using the Force to straighten his tipped stool, but it wobbled and twitched until he gave up and set it back upright himself. Or maybe the bald guy did.
“Anyway,” the bald man said, once the stool was back in place, “Sorry about that. Rev’s a pretty nasty drunk. He’s very different when he’s sober.”
“A lot nicer,” the Obi-Wan lookalike said, “For one.”
“Ewan,” Rev slurred, “I said I was changin’ my name. Ewan.” He frowned. “Arwen. Ewan.”
The Man Who Looked Like Obi-Wan Kenobi But Wasn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi rolled his eyes in a long-suffering expression that was probably a mirror of the one Obi-Wan Kenobi wore whenever he was particularly pissed off. Normally, that was Anakin’s fault.
“Well,” the bald man said heavily, to the one who looked like Obi-Wan, “He’s definitely had too much. I thought it was supposed to be - “
“Sorry, Squint, that’s your job.”
Squint stared at him, and finally sighed. Anakin tried to force his eyes to focus and only partly-succeeded. Maybe that was why he wasn’t sure if Squint was really squinting at the other man or not. He supposed that was the point; he’d wanted to forget about Jedi business and just get well and truly plastered. “Rev’s been rather unhappy to learn that the Council’s been giving out Knighthoods these days like - how did he put it? Porn holo-mags?” he explained to Anakin, who nodded wisely and wondered if all available off-duty Jedi had simply picked this bar because they’d been banned from all others.
“You forgot ‘like a Hutt leaking slime’, ‘like hairs on a Wookie’, - oh, and the bit about how it was easier to become a Knight these days than to get a driving license,” the Obi-Wan lookalike said, with the dry, long-suffering tone of a man who’d sat through too many of these tirades.
Anakin had to agree with that last statement. He was a Jedi Knight, now, and he still couldn’t get the Board of Transport to get him certified as a civilian transport pilot, much less get anywhere close to obtaining his starfighter ratings. Something about failing the safety procedures test, which Anakin thought was really unfair. Safety took on a different definition when Jedi were concerned, and how was he supposed to go about explaining that he’d been breaking inter-galactic transportation laws since he was nine?
“I said ‘parking ticket’,” Rev, or Ewan, as he seemed to want to be called, chimed in sourly. Squint and the other man exchanged glances. “Your memory is getting like Atton’s, Gav. Calling me a woman…You’d think the least he could do was to remember my gender!” he added a few words after that in Huttese. None of them were particularly complimentary.
Gav, for that was the name of the Man Who Looked A Lot Like Obi-Wan Kenobi Except For The Eyes And Height And Hair Colour, Now That Anakin Thought About It, offered Anakin a hapless shrug. He, at least, was far more sober than Rev. It was the sort of shrug that conveyed a degree of fatalism - a ‘see what I have to put up with?’ sort of shrug that would probably have granted him an instant amount of empathy, even a sort of quiet kinship from Obi-Wan Kenobi. It must be said at this point, once more, that Rev wasn’t usually that bad a person. He was just a mean, contrarian drunk. Anakin, of course, was not privy to this.
“And I would have gone to the Sith,” Rev continued, gesturing vaguely (flailing, a less charitable person might have called it), “If the Sith would at least let me put a lightsaber through the Hutt-licking son of a space slug who double-parked me! I had to sit by my speeder for hours and wait until he thought of going back to check on his! I could have burned my initials into his speeder or something, but graffiti is the kriffing path to the Dark Side!”
Squint’s head was in his hands now. “I told you not to let him get at the Tarisian ale,” he said to Gav, reproachfully. Anakin was beginning to feel vaguely awkward and slightly left out. There is nothing so much as counselling session after counselling session with Mace Windu about Appropriate Force, and how using the Force to airlift a blocking speeder out of the way did not count as appropriate by any stretch of the imagination, and that double-parking was the path to the Dark Side to form a kind of conditioning impulse in a Jedi’s brain, and Anakin had been through just that. It was enough to give him a sort of discomfort as he listened to Rev discuss Grievous Bodily Harm, and Assault With A Deadly Weapon in relation to offenders who double-parked.
“Sorry,” Gav shrugged. Anakin’s slightly-blurred vision thought that Gav looked vaguely apologetic.
“Now he’ll be unbearable for the - “ Squint checked his chrono, “- Oh, about the next three hours or so, and then he’ll go into remorseful depression about being an ex-Sith Lord, and then angst about being reprogrammed by the Jedi Council.”
“He told me he could handle it,” Gav said, defensively, “And he reminded me he was a mature man, capable of making his own rational decisions. The Jedi drinking code, remember? There is no ale, there is…” his voice trailed off, and he looked vaguely puzzled.
“What?” Anakin asked, interested. He’d never heard of one before.
“Well,” Gav said, surprised, “I think I’ve forgotten it.”
Squint rolled his eyes. “How many,” he muttered plaintively, “How many Sith does it take to keep you Jedi out of trouble?”
Anakin was pleasantly drunk, and mellow enough not to pick up on the comment, or, in any case, not to startle and reflexively reach for his lightsaber. He was probably fortunate enough, seeing as Squint had been one of the best duelists of his generation. In any case, he decided to stir the conversation to safer subjects. Such as the war. And the Jedi Order. And the ostensibly nefarious Count Dooku. Sith Lords were always safe subjects of conversation among drunk Jedi.
“That was supposed to be one of my trials,” Anakin said, after two more Tarisian ales. He waved the black-gloved fist about so that his audience could see it. Rev had passed out or was mumbling something to himself. Gav looked like he was trying to look like he was listening, while Squint appeared far more sympathetic. They had Obi-Wan beat, as a receptive audience, while Padme’s sympathetic behaviour had been a little wonderful at first, but she’d become a little creepily obsessive about how the skeletal prosthetic had to go, or she would. In the end, Anakin had resorted to the sort-of truce where he’d pulled a black glove over it. “Trial of the fish,” he explained. He blinked blearily, and tried to get the word right. “Flesh. Got my arm chopped off by a Sith Lord while dueling.”
“Well,” Squint said, after the awkward silence that follows moments of Too-Much-Information had descended upon them. He coughed a little, and then went on, “Did you quite expect him to stand there and let you dismember him with a lightsaber?”
Anakin frowned at that statement, and had another Tarisian ale while he mulled over it, before conceding sullenly, “I guess not.”
“It’s not fair to the Sith Lord,” Gav agreed, deadpan, though something glittered in those green eyes.
Squint flashed him a sharp look. “If you weren’t there when it happened, you don’t get to comment,” he warned, his voice strangely neutral, and Gav turned his attention back to the Tarisian ale he was studying.
“There’s just no juma to be had here,” Gav said, to break the Next Awkward Silence. “Probably explains why Atton isn’t here.”
The bartender, an old man, as dark as Mace Windu, and just as bald, though he wore a neatly-trimmed goatee said, “Don’t push your luck, sonny. You don’t get drinks on Kashyyyk.”
Gav saluted the bartender with his mug, and satisfied, the old man pushed a wet rag across the countertop several times, and went about his own business, staring back at Anakin every once in a while, and muttering something about swirling Force.
Squint shook his head. “Tarisian ale is good stuff. The worst thing about not having a jaw,” he explained, “Is that you can’t drink Tarisian ale.” They both nodded solemnly to each other, while an almost-completely smashed Rev muttered something about tach glands, and it sounded almost like a muffled sob.
“Not having a jaw?” Anakin asked, feeling like there was something he was missing. Squint and Gav exchanged long looks before Squint explained.
“I had my jaw cut off once. Training accident. The prosthetics were top-of-the-line, but do you ever think about how kriffing hard it is to drink Tarisian ale with a metal prosthetic jaw?
Sensing that the man was quite aggravated, Anakin wisely backpedalled. “Uh,” he offered, “I guess?” He eyed Squint’s jaw speculatively. It looked perfectly normal to him, no prosthetic, no wound. A perfectly normal jaw, if normal meant that Squint kept himself in a pristinely cleanshaven state, the sort only achieved by long hours before the mirror. “What happened to the prosthetic?”
Squint eyed him, and said, flatly, “I got better.”
“Oh.”
“You tell’im, m’lord!” A patron on the other side of the bar stood up and whooped. “’E was drawin’ faces on ‘is jaw. It was blank durasteel - or at least looked like durasteel. No lips, see? So ‘e goes an’ draws a proper smiley face, ‘e did, when ‘e was ‘appy, an’ a frown when ‘e wasn’t. Only m’lord Revan made ‘im stop. Wasn’t Sithly, ‘e said, and we ‘ad prisoners laughin’ themselves silly durin’ interrogations…beg pardon, m’lord,” he said, at the cold, expressionless look on Squint’s face.
“Who the hell are you?” Anakin asked, utterly confused.
“Report, soldier!” Squint barked, at the same time.
The patron tried to snap to attention, and somewhat succeeded. “’Ador Ordo. Worked wi’ th’ Republic after th’ Wars.” The way he said it made Anakin think of Wars, properly Capitalised and all. Almost immediately, a heavyset man appeared at the bar, carrying what looked like an outdated heavy repeater with compensation issues in the crook of one arm. A scar stretched along his right eye, pale and almost-white.
“You! And you and you there! Out! No Deus Ex Mandalorians while I’m Mandalore!”
The indicated offenders turned pale and muttered something. Mandalore shifted his heavy repeater. Suddenly, it didn’t look so old anymore. There was a palpable air of menace and impending violence about him; Anakin could almost taste the pure, animal intensity in the air.
“Is there a problem?” he demanded, and the offenders started to remove themselves. One of them moved too slowly; Anakin heard the whine of blaster bolts discharging, and several white packets of plasma tore themselves through the body of the slowest man. “You,” Mandalore said casually, staring at one of the men who’d pissed him off, “Take out that piece of trash and follow me.”
“I wish HK were here,” Gav whispered quietly. “It would have overloaded his circuits with joy.”
Squint snorted, but said nothing as one of the two surviving men carefully picked up the corpse. He trembled a little, but said nothing as the heavy repeater swivelled to point directly at him. “Move,” Mandalore said, “Before I lose patience.”
He flicked a glance over to the bar and called out, “Sorry about the mess. Mandalorian business, go back to your drinks.”
In an instant, the air of tension and the thick-ozone sense of violence dissipated as patrons resumed their activities. The bartender glanced at Mandalore, sighed, and said, “Tell me when you’re in here to shoot people. Gives an old man a start, nowadays. I don’t know how they made it past the bouncer.”
“I’ll find out,” Mandalore said. Anakin shivered. He said it like a promise. He said it like he was stating the specs of a fusiontorch, or the chemical composition of a compound. He turned about and made his way out of the bar.
Anakin found his tongue. “Deus Ex Mandalorians?” he asked. There was something about this bar, he thought. A lot of things which seemed vaguely familiar, but he could not quite put his finger on them. Or maybe it was the effects of far too many Tarisian ales for his own good. He should really give his mind time to clear, Anakin thought. Maybe practice some Jedi techniques. And then he called for a Corellian whiskey.
Squint and Gav both turned sharp eyes on him. “Shh!” Gav hissed, “Don’t call more of them down!”
“More of what? Deus Ex…Manda…Mando…”
Squint and Gav exchanged faintly exasperated looks; Squint motioned with his hand, indicating that Gav should take it from there. “Don’t say it,” Gav advised wisely, “Just don’t. We’ve had enough trouble, and Canderous is already sore about having to work overtime to keep the Deuses out.”
“Don’t forget the Jedi ones,” Squint said with relish, “Vrook’s been having his hands full.” There was just a touch of vicious joy in there, the way Squint said it.
Gav snorted. “Border duty isn’t fun,” he said mournfully, “Bastilla’s been as fried as a fish about this kid she’s supposedly had with Rev. Rev’s pretty fried too, for that matter,” he added as an afterthought, “Said he didn’t like her in that way, and would they please stop assuming he was fucking her. Now Bastilla though. She really hated it. We had to give her some time out with Squint.”
Anakin blinked, and narrowed his eyes and stared at Squint.
“Squint?” Squint offered helpfully, “As in, de-facto leader of the Not Quite Redeemed So Much As Wandered Vaguely Towards The Light Sith Lords faction?”
Anakin tried to get his mind around the long name.
“NQRSMAWVTTLSL for short,” Squint added, and then turned to a snickering Gav. “You know you’re not quite ex-Sith, but there’s always a place for you, if you want it.”
“No thanks,” Gav said, though his eyes gleamed with amusement, “I’ll pass.”
Squint shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said calmly, “You know we have better drinking parties. Rev?”
A mumble came from the collapsed form. Something along the lines of a half-hearted murmur, to be precise. “Go ‘way. M’ Ewan now.”
“Two hours and approximately eleven seconds, by my chrono,” Gav said, “Before he gets a full-fledged Revan breakdown.”
Squint waved it off, although his dark eyes shot a concerned look in Rev’s direction. “He’ll be fine,” Squint said, “HK will make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, and Jolee will read him The Lecture if he comes up with a hangover or a guilt trip.”
Gav gave him a look. “Of course he’ll get a hangover,” Gav said flatly, “He’s been downing Tarisian ale like water.”
From the way both Squint and Gav shuddered, Anakin guessed that Jolee was far better at delivering lectures than Obi-Wan was. He stared at his glass, and downed it in one furious gulp, feeling the sting of the alcohol as it burned its way down his throat. He was well on his way to being completely smashed by the time the doors to the bar hissed open once more - and a masked figure garbed in black strode in.
“Where is my drink?” the figure demanded, with the flat, robotic tones of a vocabulator, coming up to the bar. And then he turned and regarded Anakin, and Anakin stared back blearily. It was a contest he was bound to lose. The death glares of Mace Windu have nothing on the blank, expressionless pits that the visor of a black mask appears to be.
Abruptly, the figure fell silent. And then he demanded, “Who are you?”
“Anakin Skywalker. You?”
“I,” the figure proclaimed, “Am Darth Vader. Lord Vader.” At that point in time, Gav muttered something softly, maybe a curse, and tapped Vader on the shoulder. The tall figure swivelled around, turning his mask and the formidable dark gaze on the tall man, and as Gav spoke in quiet tones, Anakin only managed to catch something about…crossing the streams.
“Oh,” Vader said. Anakin had the distinct impression he’d said it…almost awkwardly, as if he’d been caught in the middle of a blunder and found out. He’d reminded Anakin of the time Obi-Wan had caught him pissing on his Master’s inherited Selarian starblooms, because he’d thought then that piss was good for flowers, and hadn’t realised there were security holocams. “I shall take my leave, then. Now.”
Just as suddenly as he had come, he whirled about, cape flaring out with his movement and walked out of the car. “Sorry,” Gav said to Anakin, “Vader’s not always very good with his timezones. Always pops up in the middle of the wrong timestream - “
“Gavril!” Squint stressed, warning. Gav shrugged and said nothing more. Anakin nodded wisely and tried to pretend he was following all this.
“Must be Caedus on duty,” Gav murmured, a while later.
Squint frowned. “I swear,” he said darkly, “That boy’s almost as bad as Vectivus. I’m not sure if it’s because he tries too hard, or if it’s because he’s just too much into the ‘pain is pleasure’ thing to go drinking.” Squint shooked his head. “I wash my hands of that lot,” he pronounced, “And I’m sure Rev agrees. Bane’s people - I mean, maybe that boy’s a bit of a genius, but his people have been going downhill ever since Vectivus.”
“I know,” Gav commiserated, “I actually met Bane the other night. We shared a Corellian brandy. Nice chap, but he doesn’t like Tarisian ale.”
The expression on Squint’s face indicated he found that tantamount to blasphemy, but he held his tongue and let Gav continue. “The old boy’s just depressed with what Palpatine, Lumiya, Caedus, and Krayt did to his Order.”
“That’s pretty much anyone important,” Squint observed dryly, “I’d say the man has a right to be depressed. He’s still not talking to me after I told him about Revan’s holocron.”
Gav rolled his eyes. “I still don’t know why you swapped the crystals,” he informed Squint.
Squint said, matter-of-factly, “I figured any Sith who didn’t know the holocron crystals needed to be replaced didn’t deserve to be one. And if said Sith couldn’t get my lightsaber crystal from me, they weren’t strong or cunning enough to be a Sith. Unfortunately, Bane took exception to that.”
“Well,” Gav pointed out, reasonably, “He was stuck, after all. Your lightsaber blew up with the - “
“No,” Squint said, smugly, “Rev kept it.”
Gav stared at him. Blinked. Finally, in a resigned tone, he said, “I need another Tarisian ale.”
“So do I,” Anakin concurred, gloomily.
They called for two more.
or: The Bar At The End Of The Galaxy
or: Two Jedi And An Ex-Sith Lord Walk Into A Bar
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Alek Squinquargesimus/Malak, Anakin Skywalker, Canderous Ordo, Darth Vader, Exile/Gavril Tal-Allein, Jolee Bindo, Obi-Wan Kenobi (mentioned), Padme Amidala (mentioned), Revan/Eran Cathael.
Summary: Extreme crack. Anakin is annoyed about how long it takes to become a Master, and goes bar-hopping, all around Coruscant. It turns out Anakin isn’t the only one drinking.
Note: Very, very cracky. May have a Ghostbusters reference. Also, plenty of cameos from minor characters that haven't been mentioned.
Deus Ex Mandalorian belongs firmly to estora , who coined the term. One Eddie Izzard quote in there, and a bit of swearing.
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A long time ago in a bar far, far away…
In the end, there was really only so many times Padme Amidala could listen to Anakin complain about being denied Mastery (Mastership? Masterhood? What did the Jedi call it, anyway?) before she turned him out and firmly told him that Jedi Temple matters stayed out of their shared bed.
She also imagined a paper bag over Anakin’s head - one of the brown, crinkly paper-filament kinds that one could still get in the seedier districts of Coruscant - with holes cut out for his eyes, although she’d never told him that. Anakin’s pout was a bit of a weapon. There were several variations: the ‘Why Can’t We Get A Fluffkit, Padme?’, the ‘But I Want To Eat Corellian Fritters’, and the ‘Are You Sure You Don’t Want To Have Sex Tonight?’ pouts were probably the most prominent among them. But this time, she managed to stay firm, and so Anakin Skywalker, Chosen One, Jedi Knight, and the Hero Without Fear found himself out on the streets, hitting nightclub after bar after nightclub, and wondering gloomily if the Universe was conspiring against him, because upon seeing his ID, the bouncers had told him that Jedi weren’t allowed in nightclubs now, courtesy of a visit from Master Yoda.
Anakin pondered the net Dark Side effects of killing the bouncer, or using a mind-trick on the bouncer, but eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He’d have to do something good after that, like hug fluffkits or give little children free candy in order to nullify the effects of his Dark Side shift.
Add maybe seven bouncers later and Anakin was torn between resentful admiration of how the little green troll got around, and wondering if Jedi Council members had a special ID that he could borrow to sneak into a bar. In particular, Obi-Wan’s.
That, at any rate, was how Anakin found himself sandwiched between a tall man who looked vaguely like Obi-Wan Kenobi (the hair and the beard, at any rate, because Obi-Wan didn’t have green eyes, wasn’t that tall, and wouldn’t be caught dead sneaking into bars at unholy hours with his former Padawan) and a man with pale-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, a blocky, squarish sort of jaw, and a face which looked like he had some sort of close encounter with the rear end of a speeder.
(Or, as Anakin privately believed, he’d looked like the business end of a Hutt. Force, he didn’t know anyone could be so ugly.)
He must have been on his third or fourth Tarisian ale, plus or minus two or five, the margin wasn’t that big, and complaining about life as a Jedi while downing Tarisian ales like water. (The fact that he was probably very drunk, or at least getting there had something to do with it.)
The Obi-Wan lookalike made the occasional reassuring sound, because anyone who wanted to antagonise a drunk Jedi who was waving the hilt of his lightsaber about and using it to emphasize his slurred statements was probably tired of living, very stupid, or extremely capable of handling themselves. Strangely enough, the last category had the least people. Most of them were dead.
It was also the kind of sound one makes to an almost-stranger telling you that Master Yoda was a hairless baby Wookie from Kashyyyk (“they shaved him, I’m telling you!”) and that his height was the result of stunted growth due to issues with his growth hormones. It was the kind of slightly awkward conversation that the Obi-Wan lookalike was too polite (and too attached to his Tarisian ale, for he was perfectly capable of handling a Jedi) to get out of. Ugly Square Jaw, on the other hand, was a lot more direct and further gone.
“Oh, shut up,” he snapped.
When Anakin did, in fact, shut up, it was more out of shock, and a reflexive response to a tone that expected and demanded instant obedience than anything else. It was also because a Pavlovian corner of Anakin’s brain commonly associated Square Jaw’s tone with an aggravated Mace Windu. “Grow up. What are you, a Padawan?”
“Actually,” Anakin half-slurred, huffily (secretly proud of the way he’d managed to channel Obi-Wan’s tone of Icy Disapproval), “I’m a Jedi Knight. Padawan Learners have braids.” The last part of his statement was smugly matter-of-fact.
“They Knighted you?” Square Jaw snorted. His pale blue eyes scrutinised Anakin, with all the emotion of a bantha’s rear end. “Their standards are dropping.”
“Oi! Squint!” The Obi-Wan lookalike yelled, to no one in particular that Anakin could see. “He’s starting again!”
“What did you do, whine at your Master until he’d thought he’d get rid of you by Knighting you?”
“I fought on Praesitlyn,” Anakin retorted hotly, feeling a dull anger course through his veins.
“They’re giving out Knighthoods like porn holo-mags these days,” Square Jaw said, and his eyes glittered bitterly. “In my day, I had to go kill a Sith Lord, save the kriffing galazy, and almost get killed by an elite Jedi strike team before Vandar made me a kriffing Knight!” his voice was rising in aggravation. “I should have just stayed with the Dark Side! At least the Sith let you have your position immediately!”
“Sorry about that,” someone else said, distracting Anakin, and cutting through Square Jaw’s rant. That someone else happened to be another tall man, bald, with his bare skull tattooed in a pattern that somehow reminded Anakin of Asajj Ventress, and he let out a yelp and tried to draw his lightsaber and jump into a fighting stance, all at once. Only he’d already drawn his lightsaber hilt, and he’d tangled his legs in the bar stool somehow, so he ended up making an undignified yelp and tripping over and finding himself on the floor.
“Need any help?” Bald Not-Ventress asked, holding out a hand. Anakin stared at it. His drink-fogged mind roughly thought about it and decided that the bald guy wasn’t so bad after all and maybe he was sort of nice. He found his lightsaber hooked back onto his belt and got back onto his feet. Obi-Wan lookalike was slapping him on the back.
“Hey, watch yourself, man. The Tarisian ale’s pretty strong.”
“I can handle it,” Anakin slurred, figuring that however his lightsaber had gotten back on his belt, it was probably a good thing. He tried using the Force to straighten his tipped stool, but it wobbled and twitched until he gave up and set it back upright himself. Or maybe the bald guy did.
“Anyway,” the bald man said, once the stool was back in place, “Sorry about that. Rev’s a pretty nasty drunk. He’s very different when he’s sober.”
“A lot nicer,” the Obi-Wan lookalike said, “For one.”
“Ewan,” Rev slurred, “I said I was changin’ my name. Ewan.” He frowned. “Arwen. Ewan.”
The Man Who Looked Like Obi-Wan Kenobi But Wasn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi rolled his eyes in a long-suffering expression that was probably a mirror of the one Obi-Wan Kenobi wore whenever he was particularly pissed off. Normally, that was Anakin’s fault.
“Well,” the bald man said heavily, to the one who looked like Obi-Wan, “He’s definitely had too much. I thought it was supposed to be - “
“Sorry, Squint, that’s your job.”
Squint stared at him, and finally sighed. Anakin tried to force his eyes to focus and only partly-succeeded. Maybe that was why he wasn’t sure if Squint was really squinting at the other man or not. He supposed that was the point; he’d wanted to forget about Jedi business and just get well and truly plastered. “Rev’s been rather unhappy to learn that the Council’s been giving out Knighthoods these days like - how did he put it? Porn holo-mags?” he explained to Anakin, who nodded wisely and wondered if all available off-duty Jedi had simply picked this bar because they’d been banned from all others.
“You forgot ‘like a Hutt leaking slime’, ‘like hairs on a Wookie’, - oh, and the bit about how it was easier to become a Knight these days than to get a driving license,” the Obi-Wan lookalike said, with the dry, long-suffering tone of a man who’d sat through too many of these tirades.
Anakin had to agree with that last statement. He was a Jedi Knight, now, and he still couldn’t get the Board of Transport to get him certified as a civilian transport pilot, much less get anywhere close to obtaining his starfighter ratings. Something about failing the safety procedures test, which Anakin thought was really unfair. Safety took on a different definition when Jedi were concerned, and how was he supposed to go about explaining that he’d been breaking inter-galactic transportation laws since he was nine?
“I said ‘parking ticket’,” Rev, or Ewan, as he seemed to want to be called, chimed in sourly. Squint and the other man exchanged glances. “Your memory is getting like Atton’s, Gav. Calling me a woman…You’d think the least he could do was to remember my gender!” he added a few words after that in Huttese. None of them were particularly complimentary.
Gav, for that was the name of the Man Who Looked A Lot Like Obi-Wan Kenobi Except For The Eyes And Height And Hair Colour, Now That Anakin Thought About It, offered Anakin a hapless shrug. He, at least, was far more sober than Rev. It was the sort of shrug that conveyed a degree of fatalism - a ‘see what I have to put up with?’ sort of shrug that would probably have granted him an instant amount of empathy, even a sort of quiet kinship from Obi-Wan Kenobi. It must be said at this point, once more, that Rev wasn’t usually that bad a person. He was just a mean, contrarian drunk. Anakin, of course, was not privy to this.
“And I would have gone to the Sith,” Rev continued, gesturing vaguely (flailing, a less charitable person might have called it), “If the Sith would at least let me put a lightsaber through the Hutt-licking son of a space slug who double-parked me! I had to sit by my speeder for hours and wait until he thought of going back to check on his! I could have burned my initials into his speeder or something, but graffiti is the kriffing path to the Dark Side!”
Squint’s head was in his hands now. “I told you not to let him get at the Tarisian ale,” he said to Gav, reproachfully. Anakin was beginning to feel vaguely awkward and slightly left out. There is nothing so much as counselling session after counselling session with Mace Windu about Appropriate Force, and how using the Force to airlift a blocking speeder out of the way did not count as appropriate by any stretch of the imagination, and that double-parking was the path to the Dark Side to form a kind of conditioning impulse in a Jedi’s brain, and Anakin had been through just that. It was enough to give him a sort of discomfort as he listened to Rev discuss Grievous Bodily Harm, and Assault With A Deadly Weapon in relation to offenders who double-parked.
“Sorry,” Gav shrugged. Anakin’s slightly-blurred vision thought that Gav looked vaguely apologetic.
“Now he’ll be unbearable for the - “ Squint checked his chrono, “- Oh, about the next three hours or so, and then he’ll go into remorseful depression about being an ex-Sith Lord, and then angst about being reprogrammed by the Jedi Council.”
“He told me he could handle it,” Gav said, defensively, “And he reminded me he was a mature man, capable of making his own rational decisions. The Jedi drinking code, remember? There is no ale, there is…” his voice trailed off, and he looked vaguely puzzled.
“What?” Anakin asked, interested. He’d never heard of one before.
“Well,” Gav said, surprised, “I think I’ve forgotten it.”
Squint rolled his eyes. “How many,” he muttered plaintively, “How many Sith does it take to keep you Jedi out of trouble?”
Anakin was pleasantly drunk, and mellow enough not to pick up on the comment, or, in any case, not to startle and reflexively reach for his lightsaber. He was probably fortunate enough, seeing as Squint had been one of the best duelists of his generation. In any case, he decided to stir the conversation to safer subjects. Such as the war. And the Jedi Order. And the ostensibly nefarious Count Dooku. Sith Lords were always safe subjects of conversation among drunk Jedi.
“That was supposed to be one of my trials,” Anakin said, after two more Tarisian ales. He waved the black-gloved fist about so that his audience could see it. Rev had passed out or was mumbling something to himself. Gav looked like he was trying to look like he was listening, while Squint appeared far more sympathetic. They had Obi-Wan beat, as a receptive audience, while Padme’s sympathetic behaviour had been a little wonderful at first, but she’d become a little creepily obsessive about how the skeletal prosthetic had to go, or she would. In the end, Anakin had resorted to the sort-of truce where he’d pulled a black glove over it. “Trial of the fish,” he explained. He blinked blearily, and tried to get the word right. “Flesh. Got my arm chopped off by a Sith Lord while dueling.”
“Well,” Squint said, after the awkward silence that follows moments of Too-Much-Information had descended upon them. He coughed a little, and then went on, “Did you quite expect him to stand there and let you dismember him with a lightsaber?”
Anakin frowned at that statement, and had another Tarisian ale while he mulled over it, before conceding sullenly, “I guess not.”
“It’s not fair to the Sith Lord,” Gav agreed, deadpan, though something glittered in those green eyes.
Squint flashed him a sharp look. “If you weren’t there when it happened, you don’t get to comment,” he warned, his voice strangely neutral, and Gav turned his attention back to the Tarisian ale he was studying.
“There’s just no juma to be had here,” Gav said, to break the Next Awkward Silence. “Probably explains why Atton isn’t here.”
The bartender, an old man, as dark as Mace Windu, and just as bald, though he wore a neatly-trimmed goatee said, “Don’t push your luck, sonny. You don’t get drinks on Kashyyyk.”
Gav saluted the bartender with his mug, and satisfied, the old man pushed a wet rag across the countertop several times, and went about his own business, staring back at Anakin every once in a while, and muttering something about swirling Force.
Squint shook his head. “Tarisian ale is good stuff. The worst thing about not having a jaw,” he explained, “Is that you can’t drink Tarisian ale.” They both nodded solemnly to each other, while an almost-completely smashed Rev muttered something about tach glands, and it sounded almost like a muffled sob.
“Not having a jaw?” Anakin asked, feeling like there was something he was missing. Squint and Gav exchanged long looks before Squint explained.
“I had my jaw cut off once. Training accident. The prosthetics were top-of-the-line, but do you ever think about how kriffing hard it is to drink Tarisian ale with a metal prosthetic jaw?
Sensing that the man was quite aggravated, Anakin wisely backpedalled. “Uh,” he offered, “I guess?” He eyed Squint’s jaw speculatively. It looked perfectly normal to him, no prosthetic, no wound. A perfectly normal jaw, if normal meant that Squint kept himself in a pristinely cleanshaven state, the sort only achieved by long hours before the mirror. “What happened to the prosthetic?”
Squint eyed him, and said, flatly, “I got better.”
“Oh.”
“You tell’im, m’lord!” A patron on the other side of the bar stood up and whooped. “’E was drawin’ faces on ‘is jaw. It was blank durasteel - or at least looked like durasteel. No lips, see? So ‘e goes an’ draws a proper smiley face, ‘e did, when ‘e was ‘appy, an’ a frown when ‘e wasn’t. Only m’lord Revan made ‘im stop. Wasn’t Sithly, ‘e said, and we ‘ad prisoners laughin’ themselves silly durin’ interrogations…beg pardon, m’lord,” he said, at the cold, expressionless look on Squint’s face.
“Who the hell are you?” Anakin asked, utterly confused.
“Report, soldier!” Squint barked, at the same time.
The patron tried to snap to attention, and somewhat succeeded. “’Ador Ordo. Worked wi’ th’ Republic after th’ Wars.” The way he said it made Anakin think of Wars, properly Capitalised and all. Almost immediately, a heavyset man appeared at the bar, carrying what looked like an outdated heavy repeater with compensation issues in the crook of one arm. A scar stretched along his right eye, pale and almost-white.
“You! And you and you there! Out! No Deus Ex Mandalorians while I’m Mandalore!”
The indicated offenders turned pale and muttered something. Mandalore shifted his heavy repeater. Suddenly, it didn’t look so old anymore. There was a palpable air of menace and impending violence about him; Anakin could almost taste the pure, animal intensity in the air.
“Is there a problem?” he demanded, and the offenders started to remove themselves. One of them moved too slowly; Anakin heard the whine of blaster bolts discharging, and several white packets of plasma tore themselves through the body of the slowest man. “You,” Mandalore said casually, staring at one of the men who’d pissed him off, “Take out that piece of trash and follow me.”
“I wish HK were here,” Gav whispered quietly. “It would have overloaded his circuits with joy.”
Squint snorted, but said nothing as one of the two surviving men carefully picked up the corpse. He trembled a little, but said nothing as the heavy repeater swivelled to point directly at him. “Move,” Mandalore said, “Before I lose patience.”
He flicked a glance over to the bar and called out, “Sorry about the mess. Mandalorian business, go back to your drinks.”
In an instant, the air of tension and the thick-ozone sense of violence dissipated as patrons resumed their activities. The bartender glanced at Mandalore, sighed, and said, “Tell me when you’re in here to shoot people. Gives an old man a start, nowadays. I don’t know how they made it past the bouncer.”
“I’ll find out,” Mandalore said. Anakin shivered. He said it like a promise. He said it like he was stating the specs of a fusiontorch, or the chemical composition of a compound. He turned about and made his way out of the bar.
Anakin found his tongue. “Deus Ex Mandalorians?” he asked. There was something about this bar, he thought. A lot of things which seemed vaguely familiar, but he could not quite put his finger on them. Or maybe it was the effects of far too many Tarisian ales for his own good. He should really give his mind time to clear, Anakin thought. Maybe practice some Jedi techniques. And then he called for a Corellian whiskey.
Squint and Gav both turned sharp eyes on him. “Shh!” Gav hissed, “Don’t call more of them down!”
“More of what? Deus Ex…Manda…Mando…”
Squint and Gav exchanged faintly exasperated looks; Squint motioned with his hand, indicating that Gav should take it from there. “Don’t say it,” Gav advised wisely, “Just don’t. We’ve had enough trouble, and Canderous is already sore about having to work overtime to keep the Deuses out.”
“Don’t forget the Jedi ones,” Squint said with relish, “Vrook’s been having his hands full.” There was just a touch of vicious joy in there, the way Squint said it.
Gav snorted. “Border duty isn’t fun,” he said mournfully, “Bastilla’s been as fried as a fish about this kid she’s supposedly had with Rev. Rev’s pretty fried too, for that matter,” he added as an afterthought, “Said he didn’t like her in that way, and would they please stop assuming he was fucking her. Now Bastilla though. She really hated it. We had to give her some time out with Squint.”
Anakin blinked, and narrowed his eyes and stared at Squint.
“Squint?” Squint offered helpfully, “As in, de-facto leader of the Not Quite Redeemed So Much As Wandered Vaguely Towards The Light Sith Lords faction?”
Anakin tried to get his mind around the long name.
“NQRSMAWVTTLSL for short,” Squint added, and then turned to a snickering Gav. “You know you’re not quite ex-Sith, but there’s always a place for you, if you want it.”
“No thanks,” Gav said, though his eyes gleamed with amusement, “I’ll pass.”
Squint shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said calmly, “You know we have better drinking parties. Rev?”
A mumble came from the collapsed form. Something along the lines of a half-hearted murmur, to be precise. “Go ‘way. M’ Ewan now.”
“Two hours and approximately eleven seconds, by my chrono,” Gav said, “Before he gets a full-fledged Revan breakdown.”
Squint waved it off, although his dark eyes shot a concerned look in Rev’s direction. “He’ll be fine,” Squint said, “HK will make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, and Jolee will read him The Lecture if he comes up with a hangover or a guilt trip.”
Gav gave him a look. “Of course he’ll get a hangover,” Gav said flatly, “He’s been downing Tarisian ale like water.”
From the way both Squint and Gav shuddered, Anakin guessed that Jolee was far better at delivering lectures than Obi-Wan was. He stared at his glass, and downed it in one furious gulp, feeling the sting of the alcohol as it burned its way down his throat. He was well on his way to being completely smashed by the time the doors to the bar hissed open once more - and a masked figure garbed in black strode in.
“Where is my drink?” the figure demanded, with the flat, robotic tones of a vocabulator, coming up to the bar. And then he turned and regarded Anakin, and Anakin stared back blearily. It was a contest he was bound to lose. The death glares of Mace Windu have nothing on the blank, expressionless pits that the visor of a black mask appears to be.
Abruptly, the figure fell silent. And then he demanded, “Who are you?”
“Anakin Skywalker. You?”
“I,” the figure proclaimed, “Am Darth Vader. Lord Vader.” At that point in time, Gav muttered something softly, maybe a curse, and tapped Vader on the shoulder. The tall figure swivelled around, turning his mask and the formidable dark gaze on the tall man, and as Gav spoke in quiet tones, Anakin only managed to catch something about…crossing the streams.
“Oh,” Vader said. Anakin had the distinct impression he’d said it…almost awkwardly, as if he’d been caught in the middle of a blunder and found out. He’d reminded Anakin of the time Obi-Wan had caught him pissing on his Master’s inherited Selarian starblooms, because he’d thought then that piss was good for flowers, and hadn’t realised there were security holocams. “I shall take my leave, then. Now.”
Just as suddenly as he had come, he whirled about, cape flaring out with his movement and walked out of the car. “Sorry,” Gav said to Anakin, “Vader’s not always very good with his timezones. Always pops up in the middle of the wrong timestream - “
“Gavril!” Squint stressed, warning. Gav shrugged and said nothing more. Anakin nodded wisely and tried to pretend he was following all this.
“Must be Caedus on duty,” Gav murmured, a while later.
Squint frowned. “I swear,” he said darkly, “That boy’s almost as bad as Vectivus. I’m not sure if it’s because he tries too hard, or if it’s because he’s just too much into the ‘pain is pleasure’ thing to go drinking.” Squint shooked his head. “I wash my hands of that lot,” he pronounced, “And I’m sure Rev agrees. Bane’s people - I mean, maybe that boy’s a bit of a genius, but his people have been going downhill ever since Vectivus.”
“I know,” Gav commiserated, “I actually met Bane the other night. We shared a Corellian brandy. Nice chap, but he doesn’t like Tarisian ale.”
The expression on Squint’s face indicated he found that tantamount to blasphemy, but he held his tongue and let Gav continue. “The old boy’s just depressed with what Palpatine, Lumiya, Caedus, and Krayt did to his Order.”
“That’s pretty much anyone important,” Squint observed dryly, “I’d say the man has a right to be depressed. He’s still not talking to me after I told him about Revan’s holocron.”
Gav rolled his eyes. “I still don’t know why you swapped the crystals,” he informed Squint.
Squint said, matter-of-factly, “I figured any Sith who didn’t know the holocron crystals needed to be replaced didn’t deserve to be one. And if said Sith couldn’t get my lightsaber crystal from me, they weren’t strong or cunning enough to be a Sith. Unfortunately, Bane took exception to that.”
“Well,” Gav pointed out, reasonably, “He was stuck, after all. Your lightsaber blew up with the - “
“No,” Squint said, smugly, “Rev kept it.”
Gav stared at him. Blinked. Finally, in a resigned tone, he said, “I need another Tarisian ale.”
“So do I,” Anakin concurred, gloomily.
They called for two more.