#netsurai

A more suave man would have had a line ready to reel him in, but seeing as hearing those words nearly killed him, Din’s just glad he could fumble out a quiet “Y-yes please,” before Luke changed his mind.

When he wakes up, he feels like he’s run over by a transport, and then seven more after that. In the dark, Din rolls over with a groan and immediately regrets it: his breath is sour and overwhelming inside the helmet, which is backwards. He lifts a hand to right it when something tightens around his naked waist.

He’s desperately trying to remember where his blaster is when the something shifts and strokes hot up his bare stomach, and Din freezes. 

Slowly, carefully, quietly, Din works his helmet right way forward, and looks down.

An arm. An arm is wrapped around him.

Luke Skywalker’s arm.

He is in bed with Luke kriffing Skywalker.

For the first time in his life, Din wants to throw up and grin at the same time.

Din relaxes, slowly, pressing back into unfamiliar pillows and turning to look down at the messy blonde mop poking out of the sea of blankets. As if by instinct, Luke turns sleepily toward him and shoves his face against Din’s chest with a warm, unintelligible murmur.

Din dares to settle beside him and stroke a golden lock. The curtains are drawn shut, but he wishes he could steal over to pull them open a sliver, if only to watch a strip of light set it aglow. He smiles a secret smile down at him, ignoring the way his heart shudders to life in his chest like a vintage cruiser raring for one last race.

What he cannot ignore, however, is the furious blue glare hovering over Luke’s sleeping sun-kissed shoulder.

“YOU.”

To his credit, Din does not jump or curse, despite the disorienting hangover. He instead snatches the small vibrodagger sheathed between the mattress and the headboard and jams it into the figure’s jugular — 

It passes right through, no more than an impotent suggestion.

“If you’d had this sense of self preservation last night, you wouldn’t be here,” the figure snarls and presses forward, pushing through Luke’s sleeping face to fix Din with a bloodcurdling sneer. "At least you've more vim than the last one." The last one? Din ignores the way his heart sinks and slashes at its head this time. The vibrodagger passes through once more. The figure snickers. “Oh, please. It would take more than that to kill me if I weren’t already dead."

Din retracts the blade for Luke’s safety, but keeps it in his hand, braced for attack. Blinking through sleep and confusion, Din tries to understand what he’s seeing. A man. A handsome man with knives for cheeks and sour gold eyes and a strange, breathy voice, not unlike someone speaking through an outdated rebreather. Shiny slivers of fractured durasteel and shattered black armor circle his head like a crown of ruin. Long brown hair waves to tanned shoulders fissured through with cracks of throbbing red and orange and yellow, and where hair and skin meet, the follicles burst into sickly flame. His hands are wicked black metal curdled with smoke, and they grasp desperately for Din’s throat, but they, too, pass through. The man clicks his tongue like he expected this, but is annoyed by it nonetheless.

Din wraps his arm around Luke’s back and pulls him toward him protectively. The man’s eyes immediately drop to the hand on Luke’s back and for a moment Din swears he sees them glow. “What are you?”

“Your worst nightmare,” the apparition sneers. With a crack Din feels in his bones, the shade grows, looming impossibly large in the small room, “I am Luke’s father. You will know me as… DARTH VADER.”

His voice whips through the room, an unholy heat radiating from his furious form.

A pregnant silence settles into the room.

The figure pauses, as if expecting something.

After a moment, Din realizes he’s waiting for a reaction.

Din looks down at Luke — still asleep in his arms, somehow, and something about that makes Din's heart squeeze — and then back up at hell’s most flamboyant reject.

     On the way home, there is an old man. He sits in a wheelchair in an open doorway at the top of a set of narrow stairs and he frowns down at Sai the first few weeks he watches him pass. For lack of anything better to do, Sai always gives his plastic smile and waves, undaunted by the lack of friendly response in return. Walking past his door and his frown with a smile and a wave swiftly becomes a tradition, one that is broken after twelve days when The Old Man lifts a hand back and calls out, “Young man.”

     His voice is reedy, thin and his fingers gnarled like twigs but they do not shake in the warm summer air. The words stop Sai in his tracks and he turns to fully face the man, head tilted curiously. “Hello,” he greets politely, “My name is Sai.” 

     “I don’t care, kid,” The Old Man replies, beckoning him closer. Sai climbs the steps without thought as The Old Man continues, “I need your help.” He wheels himself back and Sai follows him inside-- the home is well-lit, full of pictures of smiling children and grandchildren, neat and lively in a way Sai didn’t expect. He is not sure what he expected to see instead, but he has little time to dwell on the minor curiosity. “I live with my daughters and their husbands,” The Old Man rasps, “and they never leave me enough damn water. I can’t reach the glasses or the sink in this, but the husbands loathe me and they never leave me enough damn water!” 

     Sai hums quietly in response and wanders into the kitchen, carefully picking through the cabinets until he finds the one with the glasses, and he gets The Old Man a cup of cool tap water while he waits in the doorway, tapping his bony fingers against the armrest of the chair. Sai is quiet, and the man looks at him suspiciously while he finishes off the water greedily, and holds the glass out for more. Sai obliges him. 

     That day, he leaves without saying another word, and The Old Man only grumbles a reluctant ‘thank you’ as he wanders out the front door-- Sai just hums in response. 

     Every day for the next few weeks The Old Man beckons him inside of his unexpectedly cheery home and asks him for a glass of water, and Sai silently obliges because really, he has nothing better to do. It’s a few minutes of his time spent on a mindless, simple task. Sometimes The Old Man is silent outside of his gruff demands, and sometimes The Old Man tells him about his family-- the successful daughters, the sons-in-law who hate him, the grandchildren who go to tutoring after school that are going to be doctors and lawyers and other such things just like their mothers. He tells Sai he is alone all day and the sons in law don’t leave him enough water to drink because they hate him and wish him ill, and Sai almost fondly thinks The Old Man reminds him a little bit of Lord Danzo. 

          The more time he spends with team seven, the less fond the comparison seems-- he tries not to think too hard on it. 

     After helping and listening to The Old Man rattle off whatever comes to mind for nearly two weeks, The Old Man tells him of The Neighbor’s Dog. The Neighbor’s Dog, he claims, barks relentlessly all day when The Old Man is alone, drives him up a wall. 

          “Well,” Sai responds mildly, “perhaps your neighbors leave her alone all day as well. Perhaps she is as lonely as you.”

     The Old Man scoffs. “I am not lonely,” he grumbles, gnarled hands curled tightly around the half-filled glass resting in his lap. “I am not lonely,” he insists again, louder this time, and he continues, “I want you to kill the dog, please.” 

     Sai’s expression does not flicker because he feels nothing, but he has to admit to himself that he doesn’t see much sense in the request. “You want me to kill the dog,” he responds flatly, crossing his arms when The Old Man nods at him with wide eyes. “Won’t your neighbors be upset if their dog dies?” 

     Shaking his head hard enough to nearly spill his water, The Old Man stares up at him with wide eyes. “No, no,” he insists, pointing a jagged finger at the wall to indicate which neighbor it is. “They leave her out all day and night! But she only barks when I am alone and she is alone. She barks and barks and barks, rain or shine. If you love a creature you do not leave it out at all hours in all weather, no? You care for it. She is just a thing to them.”

          Sai does not want to kill the dog. 

     He tilts his head and gives The Old Man a vague answer about seeing if he could talk to the neighbors, ask them to chain her elsewhere or perhaps bring her inside, and The Old Man reluctantly agrees that perhaps this is the less contentious solution. Sai then tells him he will be going on an assignment and won’t be in the village for the next few weeks, but he will see The Old Man when he returns. He slips out of the open front door before he can hear the grumbled response. 

          The Neighbor’s Dog is standing in the next yard behind the slatted fence at the very end of her chain, staring at The Old Man’s house when Sai emerges, just like she always is when he comes by. He has never thought it strange. When he approaches the fence and leans his arms against the warm metal and peers down at her, she turns her gaze slowly from the house to him, and it strikes Sai as ... uncanny, somehow. It strikes Sai that before now, he has never seen her move at all. 

     “Hello,” he greets blithely, defaulting to something familiar in an attempt to settle the strange feeling shifting within him. The Neighbor’s Dog drops her head and her tail and takes four steps back until she is settled on the neighbors’ front porch. “Oh, you don’t have to be afraid,” Sai says, hopping easily over the fence and landing in a crouch in the grass. “I just want to know why you bark all the time-- I will not hurt you.” 

     The Neighbor’s Dog creeps forward when he holds out a hand for her to sniff, her steps silent in the grass beneath her paws. She’s cautious, but she doesn’t growl or bare her teeth when he settles his palm atop her head and strokes her ears. They’re silk-soft against his two bare fingers, enough so that he almost wants to take his glove off and repeat the motion. They lock eyes when he draws his hand away. 

          Suddenly, he knows. 

     It’s like his skull has been cracked open and his brain has been half scooped out and replaced with something else and then his head was shaken until the original matter is indistinguishable from the new. Though he’s dizzy with it, he doesn’t reel or flinch back from her because such an instinct was trained out of him long ago. He doesn’t know exactly what he knows but he knows this: something is Wrong. The Old Man is in danger, and the golden-eyed mutt next door knows the truth. 

          “Oh,” he says. “I... What should I do?” 

     He isn’t sure there’s a protocol for reporting a danger to an old man just because a dog told you it existed. She isn’t even a ninken, she’s... Well, not normal. But she doesn’t talk. She doesn’t respond to his question, either, just slinks back to the front door and lays down on the porch with a long, canine sigh. Sai sits for a moment and he tries to pick apart the feeling but he can’t parse anything from it and it makes him nauseous so he takes the feeling and he puts it in a box and shelves it. “Okay,” he says, resolving to deal with this when he gets back from his mission, “okay.” 

     Sai goes home and he packs and, predictably, he almost dies multiple times on that assignment, like he always does with team seven. All manner of things crawl about in his feverish dreams and they whisper things he cannot hear or understand, like he’s under water or perhaps they are, and when he sits around the fire at night and Sakura’s hands rest warm and glowing green on his shoulder he starts to ask her what he should to about The Old Man and The Neighbor’s Dog, but there are bags under her eyes and his tongue doesn’t want to cooperate with him long enough to explain, so he just goes to bed. 

     And when he gets back to the village, he goes to see The Old Man in the middle of the afternoon at the usual time despite the fact that he is not training with team seven that day. The Old Man is sitting at the door like he always is, but his skin is pale and waxy and there are deep bags under his eyes and his hands tremble like leaves in the wind. Sai stands on the top step and stares for a long time before The Old Man speaks.

     “She’s dead,” he starts. Sai’s gaze turns to the empty yard, and then back to him. He wheels himself further into the house, and Sai follows. Gets him a glass of water. Stands in the doorway of his kitchen and wonders if the man ever goes outside. After an eternity The Old Man continues, “she started barking more often after you left-- when everyone was here, when the neighbors were home. Her barks... sounded like speech, to me, so familiar they were. Is that crazy?” 

     “The human mind can find patterns in almost anything,” Sai replies automatically, instead of asking what the dog told him. “Whether there is a pattern to find or not. We seek them out because we find them comforting.” The Old Man’s shoulders slump and he nods weakly, turning to look at the photos on the wall with a troubled expression. Sai opens his mouth and blurts, “I think you might be in danger--”

          “I am tired,” The Old Man interrupts him abruptly. “I am old and I am tired, young man. Why don’t you go home?” 

     Sai pauses, tilts his head, and then nods in acquiescence. He turns and slips out the door, closing it softly behind himself, and he stands in front of the neighbor’s house staring at the grass in their yard with his arms on the bars of the fence. He stands there until the sun starts to set and the air cools and the neighbors come home, and when he sees them he smiles politely and he greets, “Hello.” It rings hollow, but even though the man and the woman exchange glances he continues. “I was wondering-- Well, I usually see a dog here? What happened to her?” 

     The pair exchanges a glance, and the woman sighs sadly: “She got rabies or something... started getting all crazy and aggressive, wouldn’t stop barking and growling, all the time. We had to put her down.” Sai nods once, curtly, and bids them an insincere goodnight. He goes home. 

     The Old Man is dead within the week, he hears. Accidentally wheeled himself down the steep stairs outside of his front door he never left the confines of and crushed himself under his chair. A tragic accident. Sai stands in front of the house exactly once on the way back from the training ground and he peers in the windows like he might learn something, but there’s nothing to see at all. There is no movement inside-- the people are still gone from it during the day, and there is no one to beckon him inside and ask him for water. Sai doesn’t know what to... do. Who to tell, or how to tell it.