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[credere]

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[garbagepilot]

"My inmate didn't either," she says, and she just assumes that the reason that Credence didn't is similar, something as simple as differing religions, so this doesn't really strike her as particularly odd apart from the way he says most people do, as though his family was odd for sitting it out. "Why didn't you?"

[credere]

"Scripture teaches that only the Sabbath is holy," he says quietly. "And - and our pastor always said that Christmas is just an excuse people used to overindulge themselves."

[garbagepilot]

That kind of tells her he'll probably be unlikely to accept her present, but it's good to know that now and she thinks that maybe if she's blunt with it, if she asks first, she might get somewhere with it.

"So if I were to want to give you something I can't use so it wouldn't go to waste, would you accept it?"

[credere]

"...yes, miss."

And he wouldn't have made the connection if she hadn't brought it up herself - it's over a week gone since Christmas - but since she has, he has to ask.

"Did you mean it to be a Christmas gift?"

[garbagepilot]

With a nod she reaches for her satchel, and the motion draws attention to the lightsaber hanging just beside it from her belt. It's something she still carries with her wherever she goes despite the fact that it's Luke's, that she'll give it back one day, and she walks around with her staff on her back still so she doesn't give any thought to being armed with what might look like a wand from the very distant future.

"In a way I did. I don't have any sort of a connection to the holiday, though, so it might be more appropriate to just call it a gift. Come here?"

He's sitting far enough away that one of them is going to have to stand and he might as well just come sit next to her.

[credere]

Honestly, anything that looks like it might run off electricity just goes straight over his head. It might as well not be there. He's touched his own communicator all of once, and that was just to take it off his bed and put it on the shelf instead.

"....alright."

He stands up and takes a step towards her, and with the room being as small as it is he doesn't feel any real need to come closer.

[garbagepilot]

It'll do, and he's at least close enough now that when she pulls out the scarf, carefully folded around a pair of gloves, she can hand it all straight over to him. They're in muted colors because that just happens to be her own personal taste, but thick and warm and perfect for the coolness the barge still has to it.

[credere]

He reaches out to accept them, and he's surprised by how soft the wool is, how the weight and thickness of the knit feels in his hands. He doesn't think he's ever had anything so new and so nice in his life.

"Are -- you sure, miss?"

[garbagepilot]

"Yes," she says, and as awkward as it feels to do something nice for someone she doesn't know well, to just give someone something instead of expecting there to be a trade for it, the look on his face makes her feel glad she's done it. "I bought a few pairs when we stopped in port, I have more than enough to keep myself warm."

[credere]

Credence nods, and stares down at his little taupe handful and he just wants to bury his face in it and take it all in.

He doesn't see any point in telling her he has nothing to give in return. Everything he owns is on display, and there's not a whole lot of it. Except--

"Thank you." A pause. "Would you like a brownie?"

[garbagepilot]

"I've never had one," she admits, but it's food and there's a good chance that no matter what it is, she'll love it. "But yes, I'd like to try one if you have extra."

[credere]

He goes to retrieve the tin Elizabeth gave him, which he's put in the trunk at the end of his bed. There were half a dozen in there before; there are now five. He's not sure if he likes them, but he understands that most people enjoy confectionery.

"Here, Miss Rey." He opens the tin to offer it to her. "They're quite sweet."

Because she sort of seems to him like she might not be used to that kind of thing, either.

[garbagepilot]

She doesn't mind confirming that for him either, and she smiles a little as she takes one of the brownies from the tin.

"The first time I ever had anything sweet I made myself sick on them," she says. "There isn't any natural food on the planet I grew up on, so I lived on prepackaged rations that were probably made decades before I was even born. I found a collection of newer ones once, though, and they had- cookies are probably what they're closest to, but they had a sweet glaze on them. I had three in one sitting."

She's better with sugar now, but she's glad for the warning all the same and takes a smaller bite because of it. Her pleasure shows on her face once, shows in the pleased hum she makes while she closes her eyes like that might make the taste stand out even more.

[credere]

Credence - because she's not looking, and because she's pleased, and because she shared a memory with him - smiles. Just briefly, and not at her, but he smiles.

"Trying the first one made me sick too," he confesses, very quietly.

[garbagepilot]

She can understand that immediately, can see how if she's not careful it might do the same to her even though she's had almost a year now to get used to food this rich, this good.

"It can take a little while to learn what your body can handle when it comes to food," she says to him, gently, because she wishes she'd had someone to tell her that. She probably wouldn't have listened to most people, but there was more than one meal in the first few months where she left the cafeteria too full, threw everything up in the Falcon, and then spent hours feeling guilty and horrible for the waste of it. "Just start small, like this. You'll be better off that way."

[credere]

It's good advice. He can't imagine himself working up to anything more than the nervous little meals he takes when he thinks it's alright to, but starting small - that, he can manage.

"I don't get hungry very much anyway, miss." Or rather, his default state is 'slightly malnourished' and he's never noticed.

[garbagepilot]

Her attention returns to him more directly when he says that, but not in an invasive way. She just looks at him with a gentle kind of curiosity and wonders-

"Is it that you don't get hungry, or that you're used to not eating enough so you never bother to eat more when your body could use more?"

[credere]

He looks like, well, like he wouldn't know the difference.

"I don't think that's so," he ventures. "That is - I've been hungry, I. I know how that feels."

When there's not enough to go round, he's always the one to go without. If he misses a meal for whatever reason, even if he's out on errands, then there's never a plate saved for him. He's sometimes gone without food for two or three days that way, and that faint, dizzy, sick feeling - that's what hunger is, to him.

[garbagepilot]

"But we don't have to feel that way anymore," she tells him, eyes searching his face for some sign he believes it. "Just because we know what hunger feels like that doesn't mean we have to stay hungry because it's all we've known, Credence."

[credere]

He evades eye contact, predictably, without even thinking about it.

"I don't intend to starve myself, Miss Rey."

He only goes hungry when he deserves to, so he'll try not to deserve to. He doesn't classify his ongoing background levels of deprivation as hunger, in the same way that people aren't constantly aware of the force keeping them attached to the ground as gravity. It's just...always there.

[garbagepilot]

She looks at him, the way he won't look at her, and an odd plan starts to bloom in her head, one she doesn't really understand. She doesn't even know why this is important to her in the first place, but she's never really met someone like her in this way. Something makes her need to try to change this, and so she will.

"Will you come with me somewhere, Credence? I want to show you something."

[credere]

It's easiest for him to just ignore the fact that he's being given a choice. He nods.

"Yes, miss."

He doesn't ask where, or why, not out a lack of curiosity but just because he's not used to asking for explanations and getting them.

[garbagepilot]

With a nod she stands, and she leads the way out of his room and down the hallway. Her destination is her own room, but the door she stops in front of is metal, it has a numeric key pad in the middle, and is something that's just as futuristic as the communicator he doesn't use, the lightsaber he didn't even register, and she pauses when she remembers what a shock the Falcon was to Tommy, to Alfie.

"This is going to be odd at first," she warns him, softly, and then the door slips open and she steps inside, waits for him there to give him the time to work up to literally stepping into the future.

[credere]

He startles a little, staring at the door as it slides seamlessly to one side, peering into the strange metallic interior, not quite able to cross the threshold.

"Is - is this where you live?"

[garbagepilot]

"Yes. It's a ship, but it travels through space rather than water, sort of like this one does. I'm the pilot."

She'll just give all that a second to sink in.