Walk With Me

Unfinished business.

It was a familiar subject matter to Zem Vymes, and one he'd become familiar with confronting from the day he decided to stop running from his past, and to don a brown robe again.

He'd returned. He'd become a Jedi once more. He confronted his life-long friend Loklorien, and made the difficult decision to choose the Order over her. He'd paid for a life of bad decisions with having to learn the right ones the hard way. Now it was time to pass that knowledge on.

Vymes stopped in a crowded hallway in Whaladon's snarl of crew quarters. The aurebesh on the door told him this was the place. He dinged the chime.

"Amos?"

Amos was not a fan of being disturbed. He had spent far too much of his life in shared Imperial bunk rooms, and trapped in the cramped confines of the Astral Queen over his life, and so guarded his privacy fiercely. When the door of his quarters closed, Amos was shutting out the world.

Of course, his newly discovered cousin couldn't grasp that concept. Wyl was constantly pestering him whenever it took his fancy; and today, Amos assumed, he was about to be interrogated yet again about the number of knives he was carrying about his person. Preparing himself, he adopted his least friendly scowl, and jammed a finger into the door control.

The figure that appeared when the door slid aside was quite clearly not Wyl. Different height, different hair, different face, different age; had Wyl actually been there, he might have suggested some sort of strange situation with his future self travelling back in time, or something equally preposterous and unfathomable.

The scowl melted into a frown as he regarded his visitor: clearly a Jedi, and probably a fairly important one given his age; Amos had the distinct impression that he should possibly know who this man was, but frankly he didn't pay much attention to the elders of the Jedi Order, beyond the handful who had been teaching him and the other Padawans.

He found himself at a loss for anything appropriate to say.

"Can I help you?"

The irreverence he got from Amos was, damn refreshing. He cracked a smile, not really laughing beyond just a metered breath that came from beneath his grin.

"You Amos?"

Start somewhere, right?

He got an impression from the younger man. Somebody who lived a simple life, but not without its specific complications. Seemed like he was looking in a mirror of some sort. Distortion here and there, but this man...he knew. The Force made herself pretty clear when she wanted to.

"Come on."

He jerked his thumb down the hallway.

"Humor an old man."

Amos wasn't the kind to raise eyebrows. He didn't really do 'surprised', or that weird single eyebrow thing that people did when they were skeptical or confused. He opted instead for static eyebrows with scowling eyes: glaring in disapproval at whatever was trying to confuse or surprise him until it came to it's damned senses and stopped.

It was that sort of look that was briefly directed at Zem Vymes, but it faltered after only a few moments. Amos was a beast who ran on instinct. His Mandalorian father had taught him to trust them, and they'd kept him alive more times than he could remember. The Jedi told them that his instincts were the whisperings of the Force, or some strange hocus-pocus like that. Amos didn't give a damn about what it was meant to be called: he trusted it, whatever the hell it was.

Right now, those instincts were telling him that his visitor posed no threat.

His bare shoulders muscled out a shrug, his hulking frame looming out of the doorway and into the corridor behind, allowing the hatch of his quarters to slip closed once again.

He fixed the visitor with a questioning look; though the minimalist efforts of his unexpressive features barely distinguished it from the expression before.

"You got a name, Old Man?"

"Yeah, I do."

Zem wasn't put off by the gruff front the Mandalorian put up. He relished in it.

"Wanna go for a walk? I'd like to talk some things out with you. To start with, why you're here."

The kid would either put up a front or he'd go along for the ride. Whichever worked.

Amos let out a grunt, shrugging his indifferent surrender to the prospect of a walk. There wasn't exactly anywhere or anything interesting aboard the rustbucket Whaladon, but if the old man was going to insist on some sort of protracted and enigmatic conversation, Amos would much rather do it on the move than standing around awkwardly in the hall.

"You're definately a Jedi," he mused in a low mutter as he fell into step beside the old man. A brief silence followed before he offered clarification. "You give no answers to the questions you are asked, and you ask questions to which there are no answer."

He shrugged. "I am here because I have nowhere else to be. The Rebellion wants me learning about skills that I supposedly have, instead of in the field using the skills I do have."

A sigh escaped. "No offense, Old Man, but I'm a soldier. I'm not cut out for all this zen religious bullshit."

"Soldier, eh?"

Zem paused, and looked at his tagalong as if seeing him for the first time.

"Yeah, I guess I could see that. A bit small for one, though."

He let the absurdity of his last comment linger as they again walked ahead.

"We've got something in common, then. We both know where we ought to be. Could either sulk about not being there, or we could do something about that."

It was the first time Amos had ever been described as small, at least as far as he could remember, and the whole absurd situation left him a mix of confused, stunned, and mildly annoyed.

Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it was one of those obviously stupid statements that condescending adults fired at children to gauge whether or not they were paying attention. Or maybe the addles of time were setting in on this crazy old man, and senility was spewing nonsense out of his mouth. Either way, he'd earned Amos' full attention as opposed to the half-hearted mild ignorance he'd been experiencing thus far - either he was playing Amos and deserved to be the target of anger, or he really was crazy, and Amos needed to be prepared to defend himself from being licked, or stabbed with a stylus, or whatever else it was that mentally unstable geriatrics did.

"I'm not 'sulking'," Amos grunted back, his standard scowl deepening slightly. "I'm waiting, for whatever orders the Alliance eventually decides to float my way. I thought you Jedi love that patience crap."

He let out a sigh, trying to wash as much calm through his mind as he could muster. Jedi lessons aside, Amos was a Scout Trooper by trade: trained for reconnaissance. If he planned to scout out any useful information from this Old Man, now wasn't the time to be getting agressive and agitated.

"You have something in mind," he inferred.