Jason Hunter

Teen Years

Reunion

Jason was almost a teenager when a case worker informed him that his father was looking for him. At first, he didn't care, wanting nothing to do with the man who would leave him in the care of the foster system. Then, curiosity prevailed, and a desire to be out of the system. He told the worker to arrange a meeting, and nothing further. He needed to figure out what his father wanted.

Within the week, he was seated across from his father in the lunch room of the group home. The older man had brought some trinket that he thought Jason might like, but he only gave it a glance and set it aside. His father told him that he wanted to bring him home, take him away from the foster homes that he had known his entire life. Provide him with stability and security. Family and happiness.

It all sounded good on the surface, but it rang hollow on the inside to the young Jason Hunter. None of those things he had known, so he didn't know what to expect from them. And, frankly, they frightened them. The only reason he agreed to live with the man was be freed of the state system, which had stifled him his whole short existence. Maybe getting out into the "real world" would be better.

The process to reclaim Jason took time. His father had to prove he had a stable and safe home, a good well-paying job and that he wasn't drinking anymore. Pretty much, be done with all the things that put Jason into foster care in the first place. He even had to submit to a psychological evaluation. The government turned his life upside-down and inside-out. But, that was their lawfully given right were children where involved.

After a month or so, Jason was finally in his new and presumably permanent home. It was comfortable enough, but the awkwardness of living with his father wasn't. His old foster family had never really spoke of how they came to be in possession of him, and he had never really asked. When he went back into the system, they seemed to make it their business to make sure he knew what had happened. Then each kid made it their business to rub it in.

As if they didn't have some story of messed up parents that led them to be there, too. Jason just ended up rubbing their faces in the pavement, and that just resulted in making him even more of an outsider. All the same to him.

His father had sold the house he had owned when Jason had been born years prior. The memories held there had been too much for him to handle at the time. Now the two of them lived in a modest home closer to the city and closer to his job at a warehouse. Jason was due to start middle school soon, so the two of them took the remainder of what was the summer break to spend some father-son time together.

At first, it was very awkward as they both got used to each other and their tendencies. Jason remained quiet as usual, with his father trying to break him out of his shell by taking him camping and on day-long speeder trips to other towns and cities. Things that families did in the weekends, at least in the holos. Nothing that Jason had experienced in his life.

School Days

Starting middle school was not much of a change of pace for Jason. New school, new people, new schedule. At least most of the people didn't know him, so the teasing and harassment was kept to a minimum.

It didn't take him long to fall into the wrong group of kids, however. He naturally attracted the hoodlums and scofflaws of the school. In short order, his already poor grades faded into near non existence. Skipping class became second nature in a few short weeks, and by the middle part of the year he was on the principal's truancy watch list. His father tried as best he could to keep him in line, but Jason was quickly becoming uncontrollable. The rebellious teenager was rearing its' head with ferocity as he would take off in the middle of the night to hang with his little gang and cause random acts of minor property damage. They wouldn't do anything major, nothing that would rank high on CorSec's list; just tagging buildings with spray paint, knocking mirrors off parked speeders. Things that made them feel better about themselves.

Every so often they would get into a fist fight with another rival "gang," if you could call a group of young teens such a thing. Some of them would occasionally end up needing medical care, but it they'd show up to school the next day with a black eye or a missing tooth.

However, Jason never felt satisfied with the vandalism. What got him going was knocking an adversary to the ground, and feeling the blood on his hands. There was many a night that he would wander home in the early morning to find his father still awake and waiting on him. The verbal sparing matches got Jason's blood pressure up, but not in the same way that a physical altercation did. The fights always started the same: what are you doing out so late, I was worried about you, where were you, were you drinking, doing drugs, I thought you were dead...then he would see the blood and the satisfied look on Jason's face. Then the tone would change. No more parental anger. Just concern for his son's mental state.

He tried to get Jason counseling, but the boy wouldn't say anything. He had learned enough in the group home to think his way around the counselor's questions and direct them another way. It was a handy skill he had picked up.

And so things went. His father slowly decided that maybe the best way to help Jason, was to not help him. Let him find his own way. Provide him a little bit of a moral compass at home, but don't try to throttle him in any one direction. He was proving too strong-willed for such treatment. Once he loosened the leash, their relationship improved some. Jason was even beginning to develop some form of begrudging respect for the man who ground out an existence as a working stiff and want-to-be family man.

At least this one was trying.

Things continued that way for a couple more years. The house had settled into a routine, and neither male gave the other much guff unless it was needed. Jason had collected himself a gathering of confidants, a collective of riffraff. None that he could truly call friends, but something close to it. Between that and the evening-out of things at home, he was beginning to calm down and not be so wild. See the worth in things. His rage was abating, but always there. He wouldn't fly off the handle at little things as readily nor get into the meaningless, petty brawls that marked his early teenage years. As he grew closer to being a legal adult, he was finally starting to grow up and take responsibility for himself and see the error of his past actions.

Everything was falling into place, until one fateful night. The night that his father, the last remaining member of his known family, was taken from him.

A New Low

It started as every other evening did. Jason was home from school, and his father was heading out the door for work. He was the foreman at the warehouse now, and it was time for inventory. He was working the late shift that night to make sure everything was done, and done right before all the big-wigs came in the next morning. Jason was sitting in front of the holoprojector, watching some trashy holodrama about the Jedi-propoganda mostly, put out by the Empire-and not really paying any attention.

By the time the drama had ended, Jason was asleep in the chair, an almost empty bottle of Corellian ale in his hand and teetering dangerously on the verge of dispensing the remainder of its' contents on the floor. Something roused him from his slumber as the channel suddenly switched to a news feed of a downtown warehouse, a corner at the far end from the camera engulfed in flames.

Jason had to rub sleep from his eyes before he realized that it was the same building in which his father was employed. Sitting up straight and feeling a strange sense of concern that he hadn't experienced before, he was riveted to the projection as new video came in of stormtroopers firing their blasters at what appeared to be fleeing Rebels, who piled into a waiting speeder and made a daring if not predictable get-away. The text at the bottom of the screen was saying things like, "Shootout at Local Warehouse," and "Multiple Dead in Cowardly Rebel Attack."

Two things happened at once.

First, Jason inexplicably knew that his father was dead. He couldn't explain how he knew that, but he did. It was like the knowledge came to him on the wind and imbedded itself unshakably in the deepest recesses of his brain. Second, a wave of anger a despair washed out him the likes of which he had never known before. Anger at the Rebels who had ripped the only person who had shown an inkling of actually caring about him from his life, an act that he vowed he would make them pay for. And despair at the loss of his father. Despair so deep that no tears came forth. Just a quiet, anguished moan from an open mouth as what he would later learn was the Force slammed home the knowing his father's demise.

Jason fell to his knees and elbows, riding that wave of emotion that he never felt before. It went on until he was curled up into the fetal position, passed out on the floor. The next day, he awoke in a funk and didn't eat or leave the house. He remained that way for a week or so, just staying in the house and sulking. Every few days, one of the neighbors would stop by to check on him, but he just sent them away to be left alone.

It took him that long to come to terms with what had happened and what he had to do. He packed up what he needed into a duffel, and left his father's house for what he thought would be the last time.

He made his way towards Coronet's spaceport. There he planned to hop aboard an outbound ship of any sort, heading any direction, and start a new life elsewhere in the galaxy. Corellia held little for him any longer, not that it had in the first place.

At the port, he found a transport ship heading for the Outer Rim. He found the ship's captain, and convinced him to take him on as a new deck hand.