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He finds her on the beach.
The shore is still a wreck, debris and broken shells and seaweed scattered in the sand all around her, but she’s managed to find probably the only spot on the entire beach that’s clear.
Two spots, really, if you include the debris-free section of sand beside her, just large enough for Tech to occupy, but just small enough for their shoulders to brush if he does.
He doesn’t move to claim it, at least not yet. Instead he waits, watches as she sits back and rests her hands in the sand behind her, tilting her head backwards and letting the sunlight shine down on her face.
She looks relaxed in a way she hasn’t quite managed since the tsunami hit, even if she’d tried to pretend otherwise. Tech had never been one to rely much on body language, had thought it an imprecise measurement of emotions and states of being at best, but even he’d seen how her gait was missing some of its famous swagger, how her smile didn’t stretch quite as wide these days, how her shoulders held an unhealthy amount of tension no matter when it was he looked at her.
He’d spent an unprecedented amount of time looking at her as of late.
She looks different now than she has the last few weeks, and Tech thinks he should just back away, retreat in for the night, perhaps prepare Omega’s next lesson. She deserves her moment of undisturbed peace.
The moment he decides to quietly go back the way he came, of course, is the moment she tells him not to.
“You gonna join me, Brown Eyes?” she calls out to him, her head turned in his direction but her eyes still closed. The breeze off the sea catches her locs due to the new position of her head, and Tech can’t help but stare at the way they move lightly with the wind. She pats the sand next to her before using her index finger to draw something in it. “Got a spot with your name on it.”
He is acutely aware that on occasion people extend invites more out of obligation than actual desire for association, and that these invites are supposed to be politely turned down. He is still not adept at telling the difference between real invites and obligated ones.
He opts to err on the side of caution. “I was planning to return home and finish a new lesson plan for Omega. I did not intend to intrude.”
Phee opens her eyes then, turning more fully towards him. She shakes her head, but she’s smiling in that way that tends to make Tech’s heart speed up. “You’re not an intrusion. Did you want to join me?”
A second offer is a good sign that it is a genuine invitation, he thinks, so he nods and starts walking in her direction. “I would not be averse to your company.”
She pats the sand next to her again. “I wouldn’t mind yours either.”
When Tech reaches her, he finds his name written messily in the sand, letters obviously drawn with her index finger. “A spot with my name on it,” he repeats quietly, a hint of amusement tingeing his voice, as he lowers himself down next to her.
He’d been right earlier: their shoulders brush.
Phee smiles at him one more time as he settles before resuming her previous position: head back, eyes closed. Tech catalogs the image in his mind, committing to memory each wisp of sunshine on her skin.
He spends too long staring at her, he’s sure, but, to his surprise, she doesn’t comment on it. She normally has a lighthearted tease waiting for him each time she catches him watching her work, usually a joke about neglecting his own work, with the occasional remark that she must have become a particular point of interest, given his newfound hyperfixation.
He knows she knows he’s staring. She seems to have a sixth sense for him specifically, always aware of when his gaze is on her, so he takes her silence as tacit permission to keep looking.
His mind is rarely ever quiet, rarely ever still, but he thinks this might be the closest it can come to it. His thoughts catch on the temperature, on the breeze, on the sound of waves crashing, on a nearby shell, and, most often, on Phee, but, for the first time in a long time, his fingers don’t itch for his datapad. He finds himself satisfied with only his own observations for now, even if he’s sure he’ll end up thoroughly analyzing that seashell by the time they both leave, and he catches himself relaxing with each passing second of their companionable silence.
After far longer than Tech would have guessed given their previous interactions, Phee takes a deep breath, and Tech sits up a little straighter, patiently waiting for another of her infamous stories.
“I grew up in a coastal town like this,” is what she says instead, voice absent its usual bravado. “A different planet, a good while from here, but small and by the sea. My parents used to tell me stories of adventurers that sailed over the water rather than through the stars, and I’d run down to the beach and watch the tiny fishermen’s skiffs rock over the waves, dreaming of sailing off on a ship of my own one day and finding all sorts of buried treasure.”
Tech has a feeling this isn’t the type of story she tends to rattle off in bars or over a friendly dinner. “It is rare that one gets the chance to fulfill a childhood dream,” he says, hoping she’ll continue.
She leans in towards him, pressing their shoulders together more firmly for a brief moment before straightening again. It leaves his shoulder feeling pleasantly warm. “Close to it, anyways. I preferred the sea to the stars when I was a girl.”
He blinks. “Preferred? You do not any longer?”
She looks up at him with an expression he can’t quite place. “Wondered if you’d catch that.” She turns her gaze back towards the water. “There was a storm off the sea when I was a young teen, just a little older than Lyana and Omega. Destroyed just about everything, including the home I grew up in. When it hit, my dad went with me to make sure I got to higher ground. My mom went to help an elderly neighbor. That was the last time I saw her.
“We moved away from the coast after that, my dad and I, but we drifted apart like unanchored ships anyway, even as much as we tried to stick together. He helped me get my first tiny starship and watched as I sailed off in it. We ended up closer when I was gone, oddly enough. Kept in touch with holomessages and the occasional call. I even visited a few times in the two or three years before he passed. We didn’t really ever talk about Mom, though, didn’t talk about the sea or the storm.”
She pauses. Tech searches for the right words to say and the right time to say them, unsure if she plans on continuing. He settles for placing his hand on her thigh, palm facing upward. It doesn’t take but a second for Phee to lace her fingers with his, her eyes still firmly cast on the waves.
“Avoided the water as much as I could after that. Wandered through space taking odd jobs and looking for the occasional ancient wonder for years, and then one day one of my recovered artifacts was to be sold to a buyer here on Pabu. It was rough, being here. Closest I’d come to a place like home in a long time. But the buyer was Shep, who took one look at me and saw somebody who needed Pabu.
“It took a long time for me to come down to the beach, even when I started coming to Pabu more and more often with increasingly common artifacts for Shep which he asked for with even more increasing regularity. Even when I finally traveled down, it was always for a reason, like fishing. This is the first time I’ve sat and just listened to the waves crash since I was a little girl.” She squeezes Tech’s hand and turns her head towards him, looking away from the water for the first time since she’d mentioned the storm.
“It’s strange. Thought that after the adrenaline wore off after the tsunami that everything would come right back, that I’d want nothing to do with the sea again. Instead, I’m at peace with it. Makes me feel calm. I didn’t think it could do that anymore, that it would ever do that again.”
For the first time since he’d first seen her on the beach, Tech turns away to gaze out at the water himself. “Kamino is a watery, stormy planet. It rains all day and all night, no matter what point of the standard cycle it is. In every memory I have, it was always storming; the sea was violent beneath Tipoca City, even more so when the Empire attacked it and let it sink into the depths. I knew theoretically, of course, that the sea could be calm, could be steady. We had a mission on a planet with quiet beaches like this, once, but even still, when I pictured the sea, I always pictured it as it was on Kamino.” He looks back at Phee. “It is nice to picture it as peaceful now. Peace was never a concept with which I found myself particularly familiar before you led us here.”
She just hums at that, offering him a small, soft, closed-mouth smile that he’s only ever seen her aim at him before she looks back out at the sea. She presses closer to him once more, but this time, she doesn’t pull away.
The silence lasts for considerably less time this go around, with Tech noting only a few minutes before Phee nudges him playfully. “Did I ever tell you about that first ancient wonder I liberated for Shep? It was guarded by what could really only be described as a dragon.”
Tech listens with interest as she tells another of her too-tall tales, gently ribbing her each time she adds in a detail that’s a little too improbable. This, of course, only spurs her towards further embellishments, almost always accompanied by increasingly wilder gesticulations with her right hand.
She keeps her left one loosely intertwined with Tech’s right.