[oom] something like a not'dream
The bar's empty, and that's Wes's first clue that something is weird (weirder than usual); the bar is never empty.
His second clue is that he's not quite sure what he was doing before he realised he was sitting here in a booth. He'd blame being drunk, but he doesn't feel drunk -- but it doesn't matter, really, when someone sits opposite him.
"Heh," he starts, glancing up at the newcomer. "I was startin' to think--"
And he stops.
Not because it's someone he doesn't know -- strangers are good, strangers are interesting, especially here -- but because it's someone he does know. Someone he hasn't seen in, oh, at least thirteen years. Someone he really didn't expect to see ever again (and he's naive, so naive, because isn't this Milliways, the bar at the end of the universe, where anyone from any point in the past or future can turn up?).
"You? Thinking? You have changed," notes an amused Jek 'Piggy' Porkins.
Wes swallows.
"And at a loss for words? Who are you and what have you done with Wes Janson?"
It's definitely Piggy. "...hi, Jek."
Piggy's still amused as he returns, "Hi, Wes."
"Um." Wes glances down at the table (why doesn't he have a drink?), then back up. "I-- welcome to Milliways, I guess."
The other man looks around the bar, then gives Wes a sideways look. "I don't think I'm staying long."
Something in Wes can't quite decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. "No?"
"Nah. Seems like a fun place, but I don't think I want to be stuck in a tapcaf my whole afterlife. Other things. Don't think I can, anyway."
The only part that really registers with Wes is afterlife, and he swallows again, staring at his hands on the table. "So you're already--"
"Dead?" Piggy sobers a little. "Yeah. Misjudged my altitude, got shot up by the turrets. But I died against the Death Star, and that's somethin'."
It's not somethin' to Wes. "An' it's my--"
"Hey."
Wes blinks and looks up to find Piggy pointing at him, accusingly.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Start the self-blame game."
"But--"
"I'll have to shoot you."
"But--"
"Not listening," Piggy says firmly, and presses his hands to his ears and starts humming a Corellian tune.
Wes stares at him for a moment, just stares -- and then he laughs, he has to laugh, because this is one of his best friends, a dead best friend, sitting opposite him in the bar at the end of the universe acting like a little kid. Isn't it the funniest thing in the galaxy?
He thinks he's slightly hysterical, but he still can't stop himself laughing.
"Better, kid," Piggy decides with a smile, lowering his hands. "Now you look like Janson."
"--I'm not a kid," Wes manages, a hand covering half his smile. "I'm thirty-two." Then, after a brief pause, "Or thirty-three."
Piggy laughs. "You don't know?"
"Well--" He waves a hand at the bar in general (it's still empty, it's still weird, but in a distant sort of way, now, as if the whole of Milliways is unimportant). "It's this place. Been coming here over a year, but -- time stops, outside. Maybe I'm thirty-three here, thirty-two back home."
"Still old, either way," Piggy says with a grin.
Wes sticks his tongue out at him, maturely.
"Old," Piggy repeats, and shakes his head; then taps it. "You're still nineteen up here. Married yet? I'd ask about kids, but if you ever breed, I think--" Then he glances at the Observation Window and says, "Ah, never mind. Kids?"
Wes snorts and shakes his head. "Neither, and never in l--" And he breaks off, grin gone suddenly.
Piggy sighs at him and folds his arms, resting them on his considerable belly as he leans back. "If you keep acting like that, I'll go haunt Antilles and get him to shoot you."
"Prob'ly won't take much convincing right now," Wes notes with a small rueful smile. "'M sorry. It's just weird."
"What, never seen a dead person before?"
All Wes can offer is the same rueful smile, and a shrug. Sure he has, but -- Biggs is different, Lujayne is different. He didn't know them, didn't eat and fly and live with them, and it's weird.
"So it's weird. Stranger things have happened -- farmboy blowing up the Death Star, right?"
"...yeah."
"But I got an award too, didn't I?"
"Yeah," Wes repeats, and nods. "Kenobi Medallion, posthumously. And a memorial -- you an' Darklighter an' the rest of Red Squadron, first of the fallen Rogues."
"Rogues, huh?" Piggy grins slightly. "They went with that name?"
Wes starts to grin back, again. "Yeah. Skywalker was our leader for a few years, then Wedge took over. It's Tycho now, mostly -- oh, but you don't know him, I guess, he was still an Imp when you died."
When you died, he repeats in his head, and it doesn't make him wince.
"An Imp?" Piggy feigns horror. "A traitor to the Empire in the Rebellion's best squadron? ... I think I approve."
Wes definitely grins now. "Couple of 'em, yeah. Hobbie -- Derek -- Klivian, too. Fel himself for a couple months, but he's a double traitor; run off to the Unknown Regions, now."
Piggy pulls a face and shakes his head. "Throw a punch from me, if you see him."
"Will do," Wes promises happily, and throws a sloppy salute.
"Visiting a bar at the end of the universe, flying with Imps -- what else have you been up to? Not married, but got a girlfriend?"
"No," Wes says thoughtfully.
Jokingly, "Boyfriend?"
Wes grins a little, and Piggy laughs, a hand over his eyes.
"No details, please. What else?"
Wes has to stop and think about it. How do you sum up thirteen -- fourteen -- years without talking forever? (But maybe he wants to, because if he talks forever, maybe Piggy will stay forever, and even as he thinks it he knows it can't happen.)
"Got promoted -- Major Janson, now."
"...they give you responsibilities?"
"They even let me teach for a while."
Piggy seems suitably horrified. "On your own?"
"Nah," he admits. "With Hobbie. I guess he balances me out or something."
"One of the ex-Imps, right? Please tell me he's around you a lot to balance you out."
Wes snickers a little (Piggy eyes him (still nineteen) but doesn't comment), then he nods and smiles. "Best friend and wingmate for thirteen years -- or something like that, with this place bein' weird -- 'cept for when I was with the Wraiths," he adds, and grins again. "See, they even let me work with Intel for a while."
"...the Alliance went to Coruscant bedrock when I died," Piggy laments. "A major, a teacher, and a spy? Next you're going to tell me you've learnt to play a musical instrument."
"Well, someone here did give me something called a guitar--" He laughs when Piggy buries his face in his hands. "Can only play it once a year, though, so it doesn't count."
"That's why I'm not staying here," Piggy says firmly, and points at Wes again. "So I don't have to hear it. Your amazing talents been getting you into any trouble?"
Wes grins again, but this time it's a little forced. "What are you, my dad?"
"That's right, and I'll ground you, too -- bed by ten every night. Alone," he adds before Wes can comment.
"Aw, but Pops, only been in the brig once this month!"
"Let me guess. Drunk and belligerent?"
Wes wrinkles his nose. "I don't count those times anymore. No -- shot someone here."
Piggy gets a whole lot more serious instantly, and watches Wes. "Someone who deserved it?"
"'Course!" and he doesn't mean to sound so angry, or so like a child. A little more quietly: "Yeah. He's dead already but that doesn't count here -- I mean, you know that, I guess -- and he threatened another Rogue. Almost killed her a time before that. It's, uh, it's kinda personal, too," he admits, because somehow he can put it into words, here and now. "She's my ex-girlfriend and, and I know what he did to her way back in the past, you know? That she still has nightmares and that he scares her and that, that she just needs someone to understand."
"Okay," Piggy says quietly, and he doesn't judge, and Wes closes his eyes in relief because he needs that, from someone like Jek Porkins, even if this isn't real (but it feels real enough).
"But he's properly dead now, then?"
"...um," Wes says, and rubs at his hair.
"...please tell me you didn't miss."
Wes says nothing and just fidgets with his hair more; but he turns a very interesting shade of red.
"Coruscant bedrock," Piggy repeats sadly, and holds out his hand. "All those medals for shooting. Right now."
Wes shoots him a betrayed look and bats away his hand. "I built a fort with them all -- can't take it apart."
"Well ... I'll settle for a consolatory drink. Wes Janson, missing..."
Wes sticks his tongue out again, but smiles and glances round. "No waitrats. Depends if Bar's even workin'."
"Bar?"
"...never mind," he decides, and holds up one finger. "Wait here," he orders his friend, and slides out of the booth; he simply climbs over Bar instead of attempting to order from her and comes up with a bottle of Whyren's Reserve from behind the counter. They can charge him for it later, if it counts.
"Good stuff," Piggy notes admiringly as Wes returns, with the bottle and two glasses. "You always steal it like that?"
"Only from the brothel bar, but don't tell Lilly."
"...brothel? You skipped that part of recent history."
Wes grins and pours him a glass of whiskey, then holds his own up. "A toast."
Piggy grins back and raises his. "To what?"
"...to gettin' drunk."
"Just like old times," with a snort, and he taps the glass against Wes's.
And it is, and it's good, and they talk more -- Wes tells Piggy about Tomer Darpen and Adumar ("Intelligence? Someone screwed that one up!"), about Kell Tainer not blowing him up ("But you do still check under your bed every night, right?"), about Ewok pranks and Gamorrean truths ("It's nice to have a legacy.") and, by the time the bottle's almost done, probably more about Hobbie than Piggy ever wanted to know. And he feels like he's nineteen again, feels like he's back on Tierfon and in the rec room and he's just lost at sabacc to all the other Aces but it doesn't matter because they can still take on the galaxy together; and he doesn't want it to end.
But it does, because it has to, because everything ends (everything has its time and everything dies) and, smiling, Wes closes his eyes for just a second, the alcohol making him sleepy for just a second--
--and he opens them again with a start to find himself not leaning against the back of a booth but the headboard of a bed, sheets twisted and half falling to the floor.
He closes his eyes again tightly, and opens them -- to find himself still in bed, still staring blankly at the sheets, still listening to nothing but the sound of his own breathing.
--and then he realises, belatedly, that he's drunk anyway, that he still feels happily tipsy, and it's with a quiet snicker that he tugs the sheets straight and curls up under them to fall back to sleep.
(...once knew a very fine human pilot who went by 'Piggy'...)
He doesn't wake up with a hangover, and that's like being nineteen again too.