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The Perk- Wednesday morning

The barista was currently in a fight with her significant other on her phone, and the whole coffee shop was currently hearing about it.

Rey stayed out if the personal lives of people she didn't know. It wasn't any of her business. So she'd taken a seat at the other end of the coffee shop with the giant ancient book she'd come here to read and the hope that she might be able to focus. Instead she was stopping mid sentence a lot, and forming opinions based on what she was hearing. She didn't know this girl at all but she was really proud of her for standing her ground, and she definitely deserved better.

...Reading wasn't going so well.

[Open!]

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Liam had plans later that day, but first?

Caffeine. And a breakfast pastry. Tea and turnover acquired, he headed over to where Rey was sitting.

“Hey,” he greeted, glancing at the book. “Am I interrupting?”

"Not at all. I'm not getting much done anyway," she said, closing the book and jerking her head in the direction of the barista,

Yeah, the only reason Liam had managed to get good drink in a reasonable amount of time was that tea was... not complicated.

“Whoever’s on the other end there definitely sounds less than impressive,” he said dryly. Albeit that was without actually hearing anything the other person was actually saying, but it wasn’t hard to make some inferences based on the barista’s reactions.

"She should not have to argue any of this!" Rey said firmly. "I hope she gets a hug once she hangs up."

“At least,” Liam agreed, nodding. “How have you been? Other than not being able to get work done today.”

That was such a big answer, and she weighed it for a moment before saying, "All right. How are you? It's been a while."

“Kind of all over the place,” Liam admitted with a rueful smile and a half shrug.

"What's wrong?" she asked, pushing the other chair out for him.

(Using the Force, though it'd be easy to think she did it with her foot under the table.)

“I don’t know if I would say that anything’s wrong, exactly?” Liam said as he slid into the seat she’d pulled out. The whole ‘moving stuff with the Force’ thing didn’t get any less impressive the more he saw it. In fact, seeing it used casually instead of in the middle of a fight was almost more so. “Just a lot, I guess.”

"Do you want to talk about it anyway?" she asked. "You don't have to."

“Well,” he said slowly, around a bite of turnover. “If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

"I don't mind at all," she told him. "Spill."

Logically he realized she wouldn’t have offered if she didn’t mind, but... sharing things about himself was still one of those things he’d really only started doing since Fandom.

“It’s my mother’s birthday today,” he told her. “She, ah. She died, just a few months after I was born.”

"Oh! I'm sorry," she said. "That's tough."

She could imagine.

Liam was self-aware enough to know that while his exact family situation was pretty unique, there were plenty of people- especially in Fandom- who didn't really have families either.

Like Rey.

"I suppose I'm luckier than a lot of people," Liam acknowledged. "I mean. I have her memories. But at the same time... I never really knew her?"

"I don't think that matters," Rey told him. "It's still a loss, even if it's just the idea of a person."

"That's a good point," Liam acknowledged. "Though it isn't like we would've had anything resembling a normal relationship. The little time I spent with her before she died, it was as colleagues."

Which had been weird as hell. Weirder even than it had been with his father.

"That I have less experience with," Rey admitted.

“Most people don’t,” Liam acknowledged. A beat, and then: “I’ve never actually been to visit... where her family buried her.” Technically speaking, his grandparents, but he felt odd claiming that connection when they didn’t even know he existed. “So, that’s kind of my plan for today.”

"I like that as a plan," Rey said, smiling a little.

“Yeah?” Liam gave her a tentative smile of his own. “It’s not weird?”

Liam, come on.

That was exactly why cemeteries existed.

What was maybe a little weird was the fact that he’d end up leaving the cemetery and going instead to the place where she’d died. Not that he knew that’s what he’d end up doing just yet, but.

"Not at all. That's what it's for, right? To give them a resting place, and somewhere you can pay your respects."

Rey was the girl who'd run across more than one dead body while scavenging and always buried them respectfully, no matter what side they were on. That sort of thing was important, she thought.

“Yeah,” Liam agreed. “Suppose I’m just nervous.”

He nodded at the book she’d been trying to read. “More Jedi stuff?” he guessed.

"Ancient Jedi stuff," she confirmed. The book looked it, too, old and weathered, and the spine looked like it had been made out part of a tree. "I have the oldest known texts. It's a way of at least seeing what they meant when they started."

“Intentions have a way of changing over time, especially when we’re counting in millennia,” Liam agreed.

He had the ancestral memories to prove that, after all.

"Exactly. There's some stuff worth learning from that might have been lost, but a lot of it... is about mindset, if that makes sense?" Rey said.

“How so?” Liam asked, like the curious nerd he was.

"So, some things they say don't work anymore. Like you said, they change over time. So people might not think that way anymore, society has changed, but I can still see what they were getting at," Rey explained. "Like... they had a no attachments rule. I don't agree with it-" She was terrible at it. "-it doesn't make sense when you pair up masters and apprentices from a young age, but they wanted their Jedi Knights to be able to have a clear head and make the best decision without bias. That principle is something I can take with me, even if I don't use the practice."

“Huh,” Liam said thoughtfully. “I see what you’re getting at. I would be awful at trying not to get attached to people, though,” he admitted, echoing her narrative.

He cared about everyone and everything, often to the point of being reckless about his own well-being.

"I have no idea how anyone does! Unless you're a hermit."

And even then!

"I've met a few people who I can conclusively say did not care much about other people," Liam shared. "Though I don't think they would've fit the Jedi ideal either, since instead they cared way too much about themselves."

"And i'd like to think when the time came they'd still be there for other people," Rey said, though she was an optimist almost to a fault.

“I’d like to think so too,” Liam agreed. And truthfully, he had seen that in action.

And then... there was his father. Who might have cared about other people once upon a time, but had died with no regrets in his heart about all the terrible things he’d done in the name of achieving his own selfish ends. Even the times Sandoval had helped someone it had been because it served his purposes at the time to do so.

"I've seen people do it enough. They could be out for themselves and then they come through when you need them," Rey said. "Which also might be mostly I've surrounded myself with resistance fighters, honestly."

“My friend Augur is like that,” Liam nodded. “Looks out for himself first and foremost, but he also never failed to pull off a miracle when my Resistance needed him, so,” he shrugged.

"Do you think there'll come a time when he just starts with the miracle?" Rey asked.

She had Finn, so.

“No,” Liam shook his head. “He’s too cash-motivated for that.” And yet that statement was said with a certain fondness.

"Ahh, that type," Rey said with a little smile.

“Yeah,” Liam grinned. “He was the one who set me up with stuff like a place to live. And, uh. Clothes. But only because the person who’d been leading the Resistance at that time paid him an absurd amount of money to.”

"And you became friends through that?" she asked.

“Kind of through forced association,” Liam nodded. “He wasn’t too thrilled about playing babysitter, but as long as he was being paid,” he shrugged. “And he’s a brilliant hacker, so he got called on to do jobs for us a lot.”

"Is that like a work friend?"

Rey had never had one of those.

"Pretty much exactly like a work friend," Liam confirmed.

Liam had never had anything but those, at least until Fandom. Which was kind of what happened when you didn't actually have a life outside of work.

"He was one of the only people who both knew what I was and wasn't afraid of me, so," he shrugged. "Yeah, he only hung around me at first because he was getting paid, but at least he was honest about it, you know?"

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The Perk- Wednesday morning

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