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credere

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From:

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.

From:

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."

From:

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.

From:

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?"

From:

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.

From:

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."

From:

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.

From:

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."

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

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?"

From:

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.

From:

credere

He very cautiously reaches out to brush his fingers over one cold wall.

"You have a whole ship? And you - fly it yourself?"

This, while he's coming from a time when women are barely trusted to drive automobiles.

From:

garbagepilot

"It's easier if I have a co-pilot, but I can fly it alone if I have to."

She doesn't now, thanks to Chewie, but that also brings up the question of whether or not the Falcon is still hers if Han Solo is alive again to claim it, and right now, with Alfie so recently gone, it's a question that's too painful to think of for long.

"I can show you in the Enclosure some day. You can stand in for my co-pilot, it isn't hard."

From:

credere

He looks as if she's asked him to split a mountain with his bare hands, or draw down the moon or something else equally unfeasible.

"Oh - no, miss. I - I couldn't do that."

It's so absurd a thought that he doesn't stop to wonder how anywhere on the ship could be large enough to fly about in another ship. He still doesn't really understand what the Enclosure is.

From:

garbagepilot

"If I can, you can," she points out, but she won't push for that. Not now at least, not when they're here for a different reason that doesn't have anything to do with Credence's sense of self worth.

Well, it does, but in a different sort of way.

"Do you think you can come in now? I want to show you the kitchen."

From:

credere

"Oh -- yes. I'm sorry."

He follows her over the threshold and takes his hat off automatically, clutching it over his chest as he reaches up with his other hand to straighten his hair.

From:

garbagepilot

She smiles at him then, and it's soft enough to almost be sweet. He's a good person, so hurt by the world he was born into, and things like just taking his hat off, apologizing for things he doesn't need to, it makes her feel uncommonly fond of him.

Leading him through the Falcon is something she takes slowly, taking a small packet from a cargo bin as she takes him into the galley and finds a small bowl puts a pan on a burner and starts to heat it up.

"This is one quarter of a ration," she tells him, holding the packet up so she can see it. "Which means it's not even half of one meal. If I was lucky, I could afford to trade for one of these a day. Some days, I wasn't very lucky at all."

She lets him watch as she pulls the packet open, pours a strange powder into a bowl and toss two green slabs of gelatinous something into the pan. When it starts to cook it smells vaguely meat-like, and when she puts a bit of water in a bowl, stirs it with her finger, it puffs up into something that could be called bread if you were very, very generous.

From:

credere

It's just as well she takes it slow, because Credence is always openly fascinated by new places even if he makes an active effort to avoid looking at people. He tries to take it all in, the strange switches and wires and shapes, but he doesn't have anything close to a frame of reference to fit it all into.

As he watches her prepare the -- food? -- he frowns, his brow furrowed.

"How long did you trade for?" he asks quietly.

From:

garbagepilot

"From the time I was five years old," she tells him, with no embarrassment, not self pity. She's proud of the fact that she was able to keep herself alive for so long, existing on so little. "This was all I ate from the age of five until about a year ago."

And the synthetic meat doesn't take long to get hot, so she takes it from the pan with a fork, puts it and the bread onto a plate, and gives it to Credence. Two thin, warm slices of something green, bread that has a slight squish to it when you pull it apart. It's the stuff of dreams, truly.

From:

credere

He looks at it, surprised, and then steals a tiny look at her face because he doesn't understand.

He's not refusing it, as such; in fact, he reaches out cautiously to accept the plate. He just doesn't know why she's offering him this.

(Also, he has a healthy distrust of green things that aren't vegetables.)

From:

garbagepilot

"Try it," she prompts him. "And then tell me if you think I should eat only that, despite having so much more to choose from, because it's all I knew my entire life."

From:

credere

"I would never tell you that, miss," he says, honestly bewildered, but he tries a little of the 'bread' because he's not good at refusing orders.

It tastes, well, like food.

From:

garbagepilot

"You can have a different life here, Credence." She tells him, because she doesn't think he's actually thought of that. "Until I got here, I didn't realize mine was- honestly, terrible. I was alone, in the desert, and I was always hungry. I expected people to steal from me at every turn and when people tried to touch me, I flinched away because I knew the only thing that would come from it was pain or an attempt to hold me down, hold me back.

It took being here for a long time to see that there are other things to being alive than just making it through each day, and it'll take you a long time to feel comfortable reaching for things you aren't used to having, but you need to try, Credence. It's okay to want more from your life."