Brilliant, on a curve of Skywalker

It had taken time for Ben to get over himself regarding Alai's existence on the planet, but they'd managed to settle into a routine and Alai was hardly a permanent fixture in the house and so Ben had gradually relaxed.

He was coming into the house with a bag full of the red fruits he and Ender had loved (the lady running the stall had warned them that the season for them was coming to an end, so Ben had bought all the ones she'd had left) and could already smell coffee brewing.

Saturday mornings were pretty great here, he had to admit. "Andrew?"

Ben had disappeared in the Force almost immediately upon arriving back on their ship so the other him wouldn't know he existed, but he'd never kept the wall up for this long a period of time and it, added to the general stress of just waiting for a younger Ender to get beat up, was starting to really wear on him.

He was walking around the ship for his tenth or eleventh lap that day when he felt it--the tiny shock of pain from a couple thousand kilometers away from a person he'd both never met and knew better than he knew himself. He leaned against the nearest wall and began taking deep breaths in through his mouth and out through his nose, trying to calm down without drawing on the Force for it.

"Kuso," he whimpered, squeezing his eyes closed but not willing to cut off contact, to feel in a diluted way a bit of what Ender had felt. It felt like the very least he could do right now--to bear witness to what was happening, even without being there.

Ben was curled up on the sofa with Ender's rather dry book on anatomy after Ben's research into the subject had brought up suggestions like "Bend Over," "Eating Out," and other titles that had sent Ben into an unhelpful cycle of flail. (Jane had a wicked sense of humor, not that Ben knew that.)

He had a dish of ice cream while he waited for dinner to warm up--his only outward sign of nerves--and kept glancing at the door waiting for Ender to come home.

Just another night, right? If he kept repeating that to himself, maybe he'd believe it.

[OOC: This is going to get waaaaaaay NWS, methinks. For the boy.]

Ben had spent the week since the portal was discovered taking a speeder (they had a different name in Ender's universe, but to his mind, they'd always be speeders) out to it and staring at his comm.

He'd listened to the messages from home and from Fandom a dozen times, and he was working up the courage to finally return his calls.

...which was taking longer than he thought it would.

He finally took a deep breath and dialed the second number in his address book, just after Ender's.

A voice he hadn't heard in two and a half years replied on the first ring: "Skywalker."

Ben swallowed hard around a sudden lump in his throat. It was really, really good to hear that voice again. "Yeah," he murmured, "here too."

There was a long pause.

"BEN?!"

After assuring his father five or six times that he was all right, he got caught up on family news (and galactic politics, which doubled as family news when you were a Skywalker). Slightly more time had passed for Ben than for Luke and Luke seemed a little staggered to discover he had a son who was now twenty. Through some unspoken agreement, Jedi matters weren't brought up at all.

"You sound a little tired," Ben finally offered.

"Well, maybe a bit," Luke admitted.

"Would you like to come out and see where I've ended up?" Ben asked. "I can get you the coordinates, you could take this thing called a 'vacation'. They're pretty astral."

"I'd love that," Luke said quietly. "I've missed you, Ben."

"I've missed you too, Dad," Ben replied. "See you soon."

He disconnected the call and smiled, feeling kilos lighter.

The next message was sent via text to his entire address book, and wasn't nearly as fraught as the last conversation had been:

Hey there. Got all your limbs still?--B.

When you were a Skywalker, that was a valid question, all right?

[OOC: Open, open, open!]
Ender | Tony | Tara | Topher

Spring had finally come to Shakespeare, which meant that Ben could take time from his work on other peoople's houses to start planting his grapevines.

He took his comlink out to the little plot of land with him--it hadn't connected with anyone who wasn't on this planet yet, but it didn't mean Ben was being less stubborn about it--and began moving rocks out of the field using the Force. No one else was around, so he didn't feel like he needed to be overly sneaky about what he could really do. A few hours into the exercise and Ben was sweating heavily: he'd really needed to practice his telekinesis.

He took off his jacket, carefully placed it on one of the newly-liberated rocks, and went back to work. He'd started to really enjoy the solitude Shakespeare offered.

[OOC: For the boy.]

"Well that turned out all right," Ben said to Ender as they walked back from the first of what Ben hoped to be many Game Nights with the colonists who'd stayed awake for the flight. "Can we play poker for money next time?"

No, Ben.

Ben finally got his hand extracted from Ender's (he hadn't really been trying that hard while Alai had been visiting), and left the room to give Val (and Alai, sigh, grumble, whatever) some time to spend with Ender as well.

Ben went for a walk, got lost four times, found some food and a shower and finally made his way back to his room.

He sat down in an uncomfortable chair on the theory that if he sat on the bed he'd fall asleep for a week, and began making some long-delayed calls back to Fandom.

With his luck, time had sped up there, he'd been gone for a month, and Karla was after his head...

[OOC: If you think he called you, he did!]

Ender had wandered off on his own for a while, which meant that Ben now had a chance to really explore Eros.

Wearing his most Earth-friendly pair of jeans and a black t-shirt (and slipping his lightsaber into his backpack just in case), Ben joined the people in the narrow hallways (careful not to bang his head on anything--half-gravity made for a really bouncy experience) and fought back the almost constant feeing of vertigo caused by the way the floors sloped downward.

He wouldn't want to spend an hour more than absolutely necessary here and he noticed a slightly green tinge on the faces of those he guessed were the most recent arrivals. But Ben loved learning about new places--even really weird ones like this--and soon he was searching for a food vendor and people to talk to.

[OOC: For the NPCs what populate Eros...]

Peter's email had fallen snugly into one of Bean's inboxes that morning. He'd sat there and looked it over for the shortest while, and now his fingers were typing furiously on the reply. It had been a frustrating few weeks, full of correcting plans and getting mind-boggling corrections back on his own plans.

The strangest thing hadn't been that, though. The strangest thing was that said corrections had come in the shape of idle remarks, dropped by Alai, idle remarks he knew didn't sound like him. He was starting to suspect there was someone else involved.

But now? Now, he had other concerns. He sent off the email to Peter, and closed his laptop. Here was to hoping Virlomi didn't do anything rash with her people in India.

( In which Ben and Bean still don't kill each other. )

[OOC: NFB, NFI, EIEIO. Preplayed with the fantabulous endsthegame and coded by the equally fantabulous icecoldfrost.]