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One last flare of fire and Rav alights on the rooftop, the set meeting place for today.
A robed figure sits on the slight wall that runs along the edge, precariously so to anyone else but them. They turn upon hearing him land and the brightening light of the level’s suns - the massive diffuse lamps set into the metal roof supporting the next level - glints off of the golden filigree that frames the black pits of their eyes.
A temple guard.
The temple itself is just behind Rav, though he wouldn’t have known it just a month or so ago. Walls of windowless durasteel aren’t amiss so far in Coruscant, nobody even thinks to wonder what sort of works go on behind them. After all, there isn’t even a hint to betray the presence of ancient stonework beneath, unless one bothered to look at a map, that is.
Or if one saw a figure in soft beiges and ivory adorned with gold, gleaming when they’re not flitting between shadows, quieter than a ghost as they do their rounds, ever watching from behind that unchanging mask.
Aran is always in full guard regalia, day after day.
It may be odd to some, but not Rav. There are some particularly orthodox mandos in the sector lovingly nicknamed Kih’Keldabe, ones that would balk at the idea of taking off helmets and full armor, even when everyone else around them easily shed theirs outside of hunts or, for those that didn’t take to that popular profession, special events.
Rav himself usually only keeps his vambraces and right shin guard, entirely for functionality - the former made sure he never lost his comlink and credit chits, the latter contained a brace for his ankle.
The full kit makes him feel like he’s done up all fancy-like when he comes here to meet Aran. Still, he never skips it; the guard has a love for perching in high places like a particularly lethal bird and who would Rav be to deny them? He’s gotten very good at navigating the mess of balconies, wires, and neon ad displays that clog the air of Coruscant. This new jetpack proficiency has even made a hunt or two much easier.
At first, it had felt like an extra layer of separation between them, that semblance of formality, but Rav has grown to see it as just another little quirk of their joint existence in these meet-ups - Aran’s regalia as much a reflection of their being as Rav’s metal skin reflects him.
It is likely that they will never see Aran without their robes or mask, and Rav hopes that that’s the case, for it would take some sort of disaster to rip through the armorweave and ivory plates. Some curiosity remains but he stamps it down, unwilling to insult the guard’s oaths with it.
He drops to sit next to them, feet suspended now over a many-story drop. Practically a straight shot down to the bottom of the level.
He isn’t afraid of falling. Aran had already caught him once, the first time they met, and Rav has been double-checking his jetpack since then.
“Good morning,” he greets.
Aran tilts their head in a way that Rav has learnt to read as a smile. Their hands are currently too full to use them to speak.
Some guards chose to stay silent unless speech couldn’t be avoided, but Aran wasn’t one of them.
Rav’s hand had once been guided gently to the scars that rendered even the vocoders set into Aran’s neck all but useless. He had kept his eyes firmly shut then and now the mark of the life Aran had once led on the field, or any hint of their skin whatsoever, is again bundled behind thick fabric.
He knows it’s warm, nothing more. An echo of that now seeps through Rav’s gloves when he’s given the steaming cup that had been resting by the guard’s hip. Its twin occupies Aran’s hands.
Rav unslings the bag that had been tossed over the front of his chest lest it be burnt by the jetpack - an unfortunate fate of many of his ponchos - then empties the contents.
The guard’s share of pastries are quickly handed over.
Aran kicks one leg over the lip of the roof to straddle it instead. It effectively turns them away from Rav, who gladly turns his head away in turn. He unseals his helmet and drops it down by his side then piles his gloves on top. He keeps his eye on it even as cloth shifts beside him, a shoulder coming to rest pressed to his.
He doesn’t look when ivory enamel clicks against the metal plating of their impromptu seat, a mask removed.
“So, Kev’ika has once again decided to teach tricks to Ilya’s strill-” Rav begins between bites of flaky sugar-crusted pastry and the damn good caf Aran always obtains from some obscure shop they refuse to reveal the location of because they’re a bastard like that.
He continues the tale, recounting the latest chaos in his clan. He can't help his smile when he feels the body pressed against his start to shake with silent laughter when the story inevitably turns towards the ridiculous.
He’s fine carrying on this conversation one-sided for now. Aran will take their turn talking later, when he can face them, and then they’ll spend the rest of the time bouncing random topics back and forth.
Aran will sometimes still, their attention fleeing to parts unknown as something miles off catches their attention, because the fact that they’re on break doesn’t lessen the fact that they are still a guard. Or Rav will turn away because his commlink buzzes with an update from his trackers or maybe a message from someone in his clan, calling him to hunt.
“-and that’s how a simple quest to get some uj’alayi landed us three city-sectors over and almost five hundred levels down.”
A distinct click allows him to look over. The mask is back in place. Gloved fingers are carefully folding the pastry bag only for the neat square to get unceremoniously shoved into the emptied caf cup.
“Think you can hit that?” Rav questions, one hand raised to stop himself from spitting up any crumbs from the large bite he had just taken. He uses the other to point at the trash can across the massive gap that separates them from the next street. From this high up, it's practically a speck.
Aran tilts their head, either considering the distance or Rav’s maturity, then pulls their arm back and, quick like a striking nexu, pitches the cup.
“Whoo!” Rav throws his hands up in celebration when the impact nearly tips the trash receptacle over, then realizes his mistake. “Ah, osik.”
He glares down at the caf now dripping over his right hand and vambrace, soaking into the sleeve of his flight suit.
He then turns that glare at the source of a harsh electronic crackling - Aran who is shaking with laughter. The noise comes from the now-useless vocoders catching their harsh breaths, the loudest sound that they can make with their ruined vocal chords.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, di’kut,” Rav grumbles, then shakes his arm in an effort to shake off the excess liquid. The caf proves more stubborn than him and resolutely sticks to the faint chinks and scratches in the black and orange paint.
Rav stills when a gloved hand grabs his wrist and pulls it over - not harsh, just unyielding. He gives more readily than he usually would, mostly because if this was an enemy he would punch them, and if it was someone of his clan he would probably punch them too, but only gently and entirely in jest. Gotta work on those reflexes somehow.
Now he sits still as the jedi presses a slightly crumpled paper napkin to the divots of the vambrace, chasing the remains of Rav’s blunder. He has complained more than once how annoying it was to clean the small seam lines if anything sticky ever got into them, and Aran has of course remembered, if only judging by how they trace them first.
A now familiar warmth builds in Rav’s chest and, like any time that his vode tease him for his early morning rendevous, he presses a hand to his kar’ta like he could push the metal down through his suit and into his natural skin to merge the two, cage the damn traitorous thing beneath.
He tries so hard not to think of it, because sometimes ignorance is the only saving grace around jedi.
But this time Aran notices, because that gold-lined mask lifts from where it had been focused on their task. Those black eye-slits do not emote, but they know how to tilt their head just so, shift the angle into something questioning.
“What?” Rav asks, hoping.
A finger taps against the back of his hand where it’s still pressed against his chestplate and he drops it like it burned.
A different warmth - it pools across his cheeks and ears. Damn it.
“You’re flustered,” Aran signs, the napkin dropped somewhere by the wayside.
Rav uses that as an excuse to turn away to nominally look for it, though of course he still must keep half an eye on Aran and their hands. “I’m not.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing! It’s nothing,” he insists, because while it is in fact not nothing, it’s still nothing that he wants Aran to know.
He’s glad that in one of their previous conversations, when Rav was still as skittish around the guard as he was insistent to befriend them, the jedi had taken time to explain that no, Force-users generally didn’t read minds unless their species, or rare gifts, allowed them to do so.
Rav is mando’ad - as a rule they are often as covetous as the jedi are selfless, because finding joy in the moment is much easier if you keep what you like. In this case, however, it means not imposing and Rav’s determination to succeed in this matter rivals the drive of any of his hunts.
Aran tilts their head one way, then another.
“Will you not tell me?” They ask. It’s hard to read emotion in sign language without facial expressions to act as a shortcut, but now their hands move with a sort of pointed slowness and grace.
Rav has a sense he’s being teased, perhaps. “No.”
“Can I try to guess?”
Rav ponders exactly how much they want to bet on that damned jedi luck and intuition. He must think for a moment too long, because Aran moves their hands again.
“I have an idea,” They tell him. “May I?”
That is wildly lacking in any sort of detail, but Rav doesn’t hesitate to nod, “Alright.”
Aran reaches for his helmet. Their hand pauses before they can touch the metal, a second of pointed pause that carries a silent question. When Rav says nothing, they lift it up.
Rav snorts a little when the helmet upsets his hair as it’s put over his head and guided down by hands unfamiliar with the gesture. The sensation of the wild strands bunching up in odd ways makes his scalp itch.
The HUD, recognizing his face, blips on for just a second and shows him a glimpse of Aran’s mask, drawn closer than it has ever been.
For just a second, he swears that he could try to see their eyes beyond the tinted lenses, make out the vague shape and the slight hint of color. His heart jumps a little in his chest, torn between wishful thinking and the panic that he may accidentally overstep the oaths that bind their secrecy.
He goes to warn them, but then his vision goes dark again as, before the seal of his buy’ce can engage, it’s lifted right back up, now tilted back enough that it catches awkwardly against his face. The cold edge of the HUD presses against the tip of his nose and the leatheris-padded rim digs into his cheekbones. Some kind of electronic component scrapes slightly over his eye and forces him to shut them as the grip that puppetted the buy’ce rearranges.
“What are you-?” Rav tries to ask, but doesn’t get to finish his thought.
There really isn’t much thinking going on at all, when all his senses focus on the source of his sudden silence - lips pressed against his own.
It’s simple, as far as kisses go. It’s perfect - there’s nothing to distract Rav from categorizing every detail.
The warmth of skin that offsets the cold bite of the early morning air. The faint scrape as those lips move when he presses back into them, slightly chapped, the slight change of texture, maybe a scar.
Unbidden, his hand comes up, seeking connection, to touch this new and fragile thing.
His fingers bump against something solid. A sharp flash of sensation, the cold brush of ceramic against his jaw - another mask hasn’t been fully taken off either, just momentarily pushed away.
The warmth pulls back and his helmet slips back down over his face. He opens his eyes to his HUD flicking on, just in time to see Aran settling their mask into place, though luckily not so early that he catches even a single glimpse of what lies beaneath.
Void, but that conflict now burrows into his heart at double-time, the determination to act with honor in honoring Aran’s oaths and yet he has gotten a slightest taste of it now - literally and figuratively - and with that little seed his curiosity can flourish into the enforced unknown.
He stamps it down with practiced effort.
“Did I guess right?” Aran asks and it takes Rav a second to actually remember to track what they’re signing, because he’s too busy staring at that blank mask.
“Uh,” He replies. “Yeah?”
A twitch of Aran’s shoulders, though not strong enough to bring the vocoder crinkle of full-blown laughter. Their hands move again. “Are you happy?”
A thought suddenly strikes.
“You didn’t just kiss me for my sake, did you?” Rav demands, slightly panicked. Because honestly, it would be just the type of thing for Aran to do, the same way that they had gone along with Rav’s insistence to pay them back from saving his ass when they met.
Of course it had taken him a while to figure out the sort of debt that a jedi would accept, because Rav refused to have an indistinct IOU hanging over his head and soiling his honor. The threat to keep bringing them breakfast was supposed to be a way to annoy the guard into actually telling him - he had never expected the guard to accept, nor end up happy doing so.
“Of course not,” Aran signs, their shoulders shaking again.
“Then-” Rav starts, cuts himself off when he notices that Aran didn’t actually finish signing their piece.
“You make me happy when we’re together. Warm. You feel happy. I was wondering if it was the same sort.” Clearly they’re working with the meager words that they both know in basic sign, since Aran regularly used a different kind with the jedi and Rav has only started learning the basic variety instead of bocce.
“I hope so,” Rav admits because between the two of them he’s not the empath and often not even too empathetic to begin with, though he has been trying more, lately.
Damned compassionate philosophers. He can’t believe he ever thought of jedi only by how much damage they could do with a plasma blade and if he could ever convince one to test it against his beskad.
“I know I’m a temple guard-,” Aran begins and Rav doesn’t need to know where this may be going because he sees the slightly hesitant way that they form the sign for the temple guard, the other sign it is built around - ‘forever’.
“I know, but I like this, us, as we are.” Rav cuts them off. “And that means you, like this, as a guard.”
“Even if I never let you see me?” Aran asks.
“Your dedication is part of you,” Rav points out.
“But you’re curious.”
“Yes, but I’m also mando’ad, and that means I’m stubborn to a fault,” Rav shrugs. “I’ll keep your oaths like I keep mine. Why did you kiss me, if you weren’t sure?”
“I wanted to try, if only once.”
Rav doesn’t know how to respond to such a statement but on a completely different thought, he doesn’t need a better opening than that. “You could try it again, if you’d like.”
And just to make a point, he unseals his helmet and tilts it up, enough for Aran to see his wink.
He doesn’t need to see their eyes to know they rolled them - their head moves slightly, to one side then the other. “You’re incorrigible.”
“I have just been informed that you like it,” Rav points out.
“We need to talk about this.”
“Maybe after you get more data?”
Success - the tension in Aran’s shoulders uncoils. They shake their head, but there’s a fondness to it, the slow intent of the motion. “Keep your eyes closed, then.”
“Gladly.”
Maybe to anyone else, they would need more poetic words for it - love, delight, exaltation, some overblown and exaggerated thing that is two steps removed from what it is for the sake of impact.
But there is nothing world-shaking in this, no impact, just a natural progression.
Rav, eyes shut tight, skims a tentative hand against warm skin and feels cold ivory brush against his knuckles, two faces of the same person, equally genuine, and as much as he’ll ever know of them.
Aran is smiling.
He is too, because this is enough. He’s happy.