Chapter Text
There she is.
At one of the first floor windows of his neighbor's house.
She's half hiding behind the curtain, but it's not enough for Ben not to see she's checking his backyard. She stays there, as if she was waiting for something to happen.
It's summer but she's wearing a light blue long sleeved top that looks like it's made of cotton, and a knee-length skirt. A low bun. A well-behaved adult, that one.
She must think he knows nothing about her watching him whenever he's out.
He's at his window himself, not even hiding, waiting to see when she'll get tired of it and leave.
What happens is even better. For some reason she lifts up her eyes and sees him watching her. If he ever had any doubt about her spying on him, the way she pulls back from the window as if burnt is proof enough of her guilty hobby.
He can't deny he's curious of the interest his creepy neighbor has for him. It's not like he's got anything else to do.
"What's your deal, woman ?" he mutters to himself.
The house stays silent in return.
Trees heavy with birds and taller that two story houses, all aligned for miles and miles, arranged in a suburban maze.
He would have found his street sort of beautiful seeing it three months ago for the first time since his eighteenth birthday, if it weren't for the circumstances that got him back here in the first place.
He wishes he'd been on house arrest during the winter. Maybe it would have been more tolerable, than now that he can't drive to the ocean due to his mandatory confinement all the while having to hear his nearby neighbors enjoy their pools all day.
Not that he ever forgets his driver's license has been revoked.
Now that he thinks of it, everything is worth looking at when you get out of prison. He's only been there for a year, and despite the general inertia he felt the day of his release he'd been caught staring at the smallest things through the window of the police car that drove him back at his mother's. He just couldn't have enough of being on the highway, passing by gas stations, then later bus stops.
Liquor stores.
But maybe his hometown really just remained the shitty average sized suburban town he hated as a kid after all.
His mother dares to take some pride -through the ever-growing shame she desperately tries to hide from him- in the fact that he got out on probation because of his good behavior, and he isn't cruel enough to let her know that really this generosity of the judge is only due to the prisons across the state being insanely overcrowded.
She's stuck with him. The least he can do is let her cling onto whatever's left of the hopes she had for him once upon a time.
He's lost weight. Turns out being stuck at home months at a time doesn't do your physique any good. Neither does what he still refuses to call a depression, and that his mother was quick to diagnose.
He doesn't eat because there's nothing good to eat, but obviously he's not the one grocery shopping. He can't really complain to his mother about it.
He prefers not to think about the reasons why he doesn't sleep.
Only a year in prison, yet after three months spent in this house he still hasn't lost the habit to walk in circles in his room.
It's like a second nature he can't shake, no matter how long he's been out. Maybe it speaks volumes about the kind of freedom he really has.
Whenever he's in his backyard, it's not long before he walks in circles again, head low, keeping his mind busy with nonsense or mild obsessions. Some might say keeping his mind empty. He doesn't care to find out which is true.
Only three months to go, and he'll been gone forever all over again.
But at least, for now…
He's got a neighbor that looks like she's got a lot of time on her hands too.
Every time he's out, which wasn't often up until he noticed she was watching him, she gets behind one of her windows, places herself in a way she believes doesn't reveal her presence, and looks at him.
Who the fuck is she ?
From what little he made out of her face, he doesn't recognize her from when he was a teen.
His mother tries to hide her impatience when he asks her about the woman who hangs at the Kenobi's house all day.
Right. He tends to not realize he's constantly asking her questions. A house arrest will do that to someone.
As soon as she's at the door, he gets to her and asks all kinds of shit, like a five year-old. It's almost upsetting to him to have himself acting like a child all over again.
Nothing's more unsettling than going from a testosterone filled environment where he lifted weights and kept a poker face all day straight to his childhood home, living with his mother and acting like the boy she had very little patience for when he actually was one.
She's sick of it, he can tell, despite her trying not to show it too much -doing in the end a terrible job at it.
"I don't know, Ben. I know she's his granddaughter, maybe she takes care of him ? You know Kenobi's terribly old."
"He was terribly old when I was fifteen, how come he hasn't died yet ?"
She ignores him.
It's alright, he can take a bit of indifference.
It's not like she spends all her time outside the house working or doing whatever she finds to do in order to avoid his company; not like he spends his days completely alone since no one is even remotely close to pay a visit to the walking disappointment of the Solo family.
But if Kenobi's granddaughter keeps staring at him whenever he's out, life might just be about to get less lonely.