From the Graveyard

It was quiet. All the excitement of the evening had faded away, and in its place? The comfort of a dull, routine graveyard shift.

The monitoring systems hummed quietly, beeping at regular intervals to inform their attendants that no new activity had been detected. The attendants watched, looking for patterns outside to keep engaged. It was like finding shapes in clouds, except that shattered chunks of what was once Alderaan substituted for fluffy masses of water vapor, blown by wind. More, "That one looks like a rock," and less, "That one looks like a cotton ball."

The quiet was the foremost thing on Jenros' mind at the moment. Laying there on his bed, with his eyes shut tight, he was acutely aware of a dull humming in the background, as though someone had left a vidscreen on somewhere. Aside from that, there was nothing. No wind, no speeders, just... space. That kind of quiet always unnerved him. Something about leaky pipes or rickety ductwork was kind of comforting. Like a lullaby almost. How anyone could sleep with all of this quiet around was beyond him.

He felt the metallic cylinder dig into his chest as he shifted on his bed, and thought bitterly to himself about how none of the stories he'd read ever talked about how uncomfortable and cold these things were. He cracked open his eyes, made sure nobody was in the room, and for the seventh time since being left alone in his room, took out the... flashlight. He'd found that if he squinted his eyes, and never turned it on, he was sure it was just a flashlight; and the night's earlier meeting was something he'd dreamed up. There was no way any of that could be true. The Jedi were gone, right? And, he told himself, even if they had managed to survive, there was bound to be someone else. Never mind that for the first time since setting out on his own, he felt like he was in the right place, this was crazy. And yet...

It was these unthinkable, if hopeful, thoughts, these "And Yets" that kept him from anything close to a good night's rest.