milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

She is visiting the bar again, the sharply dressed woman with the angular face and the wide eyes.

Currently, she is simply sitting at one of the centrally-located tables, sipping her coffee, and listening to the buzz of bar room conversation around her.

It seems some fascinating things have been going on, lately.

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There's a man at the bar who looks like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, only about ten degrees scruffier, ordering cat food while a young white-and-red cat on his shoulder supervises the transaction.

Even in Milliways, where strangeness is commonplace, a man walking easily with a cat perched comfortably on his shoulder is a man worth watching.

Cats tend to gravitate towards interesting people, after all.

Hedda watches the man idly, smiling when happenstance leads to her meeting his gaze after he's ordered food for the young cat.

"Only the best for the ones we love, no?"

"Oh yes," the man says, "absolutely. It's so heartwarming to see them happy and know we caused that."

"Happiness is strange like that," Hedda agrees, wry fondness for something or someone not here in her faint chuckle as she sips her coffee. "A positive feedback loop, as it were. Making our loved ones happy makes us happy in turn, which warms our loved one's hearts and makes them happy, and so forth."

She smiles at the little cat, so proud and contented. "It's no wonder that love can make one feel positively incandescent."

"It does," the man says. "And having the cats adding to it makes it oddly perfect because they refuse to be awed. People say that all happy families are alike, and all unhappy ones interestingly different, but I have been interestingly different for long enough. I'm glad to be boring now."

He offers his hand.

"Galen Erso. Scientist. Dead."

The woman's smile brightens as she shakes his hand. "Hedda Winchell. News coordinator. Currently living in Los Angeles, California, on Earth."

"...Though I have been coming here some while now, it's still strange to say one is sorry to hear of a person's passing, when one just met them and wouldn't have had the chance to meet them if they were alive," she admits, candidly, giving a helpless little smile for the weirdness of Milliways. "In any case, I'm sorry for your passing but nevertheless glad to meet you, Galen Erso."

"You carry a most distinguished name, I must say."

Galen shakes her hand, but looks a bit startled. "My name is distinguished?" he says. "Then there must have been another Galen Erso; I'm more like -- controversial."

Death Star and all that.

"Controversial?" she blinks her wide eyes at him, obviously curious but perhaps too polite to ask outright.

Perhaps.

"Aelius Galenus, or Claudius Galenus, was quite a prominent Greek physician and philosopher some eighteen hundred years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire. He influenced the development of numerous fields of scientific study, and served as the personal physician to a number of the emperors. He is more commonly - though 'commonly' is perhaps a generous word - known as Galen of Pergamon. Though most have forgotten his name and influences in the intervening centuries, his name is still referenced from time to time by science or pop culture. Modern Earth scientists named a small crater on the Earth's moon after him."

"I'm just a scientist, and I didn't really want to serve the Empire," Galen says. "But then, the name is probably a coincidence. I'm not from Earth; it's not even in our Galaxy."

"So far away," she breathes, seemingly amazed at the idea of such a distance. "You're right, it would have to be a coincidence - there are only so many names."

"Though I suppose it is in the common nature of empires that some who serve them would really rather not. Empires are known for not really caring what individuals would prefer."

"That is a bit of an understatement," Galen nods. "Which is why I ended up dead."

"You and innumerable others who did not want to serve the unnumbered empires that have existed throughout the universe's history," she murmurs.

That is what empires are known for.

"But here, beyond the scope of your life, you are free of the empire and its desires?"

"Yes, I am," Galen says. "And I have love. But we're not free of our guilt yet."

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