Chapter Text
She stands opposite herself. Her own eyes stare into her. Dark pools of longing, love, and desperation. The new light of the rising sun kisses the tops of the trees, but it can’t penetrate any further, the dense forest canopy swallowing all incoming light and leaving only darkness. The light can’t touch those dark eyes either. Those two mirrors reflecting things back to her she would rather forget.
Her other self closes the distance between them, and she is wrapped in her own arms. A sensation so familiar and yet so alien. The embrace is painful, but the pain isn’t only from arms holding too tight. Her heart aches in her chest. An alchemy of soul deep fury and an unconditional love she will never be rid of beating an agonizing rhythm. Despite the pain, she can’t help but return the embrace. Feel her two hearts as they race in tandem.
Her other self pleads through tears, “Choose me. Choose us.”
Us.
That’s right. One born as two.
There are two of them. Twins.
Sisters.
Her sister Mae.
Osha rushes out of sleep with a gasp. Her eyes dart around as she instantly realizes she is no longer in the shadowed forest. Instead, she is in a cave.
No, not just a cave.
Someone lives here.
The signs are everywhere. First, the bed underneath her. A platform built around the natural upcropping of rocks from the cave floor. Then there is a pot of soup bubbling on a burner next to some kind of small natural pool of water. There is also old machinery everywhere. She turns to continue her investigation of the strange cave when she feels a sudden pain at her side.
Right. Mae force pushed her. She must’ve gotten hurt.
She raises her shirt (she’s no longer wearing her civilian robes, stripped down to only her tank top) to inspect herself and sees that someone has bandaged her. A little blood has seeped through, but after a little poke, the wound doesn’t seem serious. She raises her head once again and notices all the medical supplies on a little table next to the bed.
Did Mae kidnap her and bring her here? It’s the only thing that makes sense. But where is she? Why would Mae leave her alone? Wouldn’t she be worried about Osha running away? Then again, maybe there isn’t anywhere for her to run. Where is here? Are they still on Khofar?
No. That doesn’t seem right.
The sole reason Mae was on Khofar was to kill Kelnacca. This cave looks well lived in. Not like a temporary shelter set up for a day or two. Even if that wasn’t the case, Mae would never stay on Khofar after everything. That would be asking to get caught, and Mae clearly had no intention of letting the Jedi catch her. The Jedi or…that masked man.
Osha’s fists tighten at her sides as the memory of the way he danced in the dark with his red lightsaber flashes in her mind. She’d never seen anyone move like that. Kill like that.
He must be the one.
Mae’s master. The one who taught her to kill.
A sudden spike of cold dread.
What happened after Mae knocked her out? Did Mae kill Sol like her master killed Jecki and Yord? Was Osha truly alone now? The spike of cold dread starts to spiral out into fissures of raw panic that could crack her wide open if she let them. She bites down on her lower lip. A new pain. A pain she can handle and control.
“No,” she says aloud as she closes her eyes.
Center yourself. Control your emotions, don’t let them control you.
A lesson Sol had tried to teach her many times.
She breathes in deep and releases it slowly. The panic recedes but doesn’t disappear. It’s the best she can do. Bury it. Ignore it. Focus on what’s important.
She opens her eyes.
She’s no longer on Khofar. She is somewhere else. She needs to find out where. Until she knows where, she won’t be able to figure out a proper plan of escape.
Osha lowers herself from the bed, careful not to slip on the uneven floor, the rocks cold and damp on her bare feet. The sensation helps her to ground herself. She is here. She is alive.
The smell of the soup has her empty stomach panging against her will, as if confirming that yes, she is alive, and she better eat if she wants to stay that way. She involuntarily steps closer to the bubbling pot when her eyes light on a flask sat on a ledge of stone being used as a table. At the sight of it, she becomes terribly aware of her dry mouth. She grabs the bottle to look inside. It looks like water. She smells it. Smells like water. No odd odors. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Nonetheless, if Mae wanted her dead, she would do it eye to eye. Secret poison when she isn’t even in the room wouldn’t be the way. And today at least, Mae doesn’t want her dead.
The bandages prove that.
She gulps the water down. It is bliss. Cool and soothing on her parched lips and throat. She empties the flask before setting it down. She’s eyeing the soup when suddenly a chirp of some sort sounds out. The kind of noise an animal would make.
Her gaze shoots towards the sound. A strange and tiny birdlike creature with wrinkled grey skin and a long snout across the cave is on the other side of the pool of water. There is also natural light spilling into the cave from that direction. The exit.
She guardedly makes her way around the pool and towards the cave entrance, listening for any signs of approaching footsteps, but stops as a glint of light bouncing off metal flashes in her peripheral vision. She knows she should keep going. She crouches to inspect the object.
A dagger.
She runs her fingers along its sharp length and instantly knows. This dagger belongs to Mae. It might even be the very dagger her sister killed Master Indara with. Osha has the urge to hurl the dagger into the pool of water and watch it sink, but instead curls her fingers tight around the hilt. The metal is warm and solid in her hand. She needs something to protect herself with.
Mae might not want her dead, but that could change. After all, before the fire, Osha had believed her sister wasn’t capable of truly hurting her, let alone trying to kill her. She’d been wrong. She would never make that mistake again.
Along with the dagger is a bundle of clothes and a pair of boots. She slips the boots on and chooses a light sweater from the bundle. Of course, they fit perfectly.
She makes her way out of the cave, the dagger still clutched tight in her grip.
Outside the cave she’s met with steep stone steps that lead down to a rocky beach and an ocean that stretches out uninterrupted into the horizon. Save for a small island right off the coast. On that island, there is a small ship. The ship that must’ve brought them here. She doesn’t recognize it. It isn’t the Jedi ship, so it must be Mae’s.
If Osha can get to that ship, she can fly out of here.
There is only one problem.
The ocean isn’t calm. It’s angry. Roaring with waves that crash ceaselessly against the rocks. She cautiously navigates the uneven rocks of the coastline until she’s at the water’s edge. She can’t take her eyes off the ship. It’s not a long swim, distance wise. She takes a step into the water.
It’s cold, but not unbearably so. She takes another step, and then another, until she’s waist deep. Already, she can feel the powerful push and pull of the waves. She stops. This is death.
She stands, suspended in the cold water and her own uncertainty. Forward is death, but what lies back on the beach? She feels the phantom squeeze of Mae’s arms around her and can’t make herself move. Not until she feels another powerful pull. This time, it is not the waves.
It’s the force. The magnetic pull of another force user.
Someone behind her.
She turns slowly towards the beach and the cold dread returns like ice in her veins. The cold water around her feels balmy in comparison. No. It can’t be.
It is.
The smuggler from Olega. The masked man. Mae’s master.
He’s dressed in the same sleeveless black robes as last night, but unlike last night, he isn’t moving to kill. He is instead making his way across the beach with long easy strides. He looks at ease, as if he belongs here. He doesn’t spare her a glance.
All Osha can do is watch, frozen, the waves pushing and pulling at her.
He’s moving further and further along the beach. Away from her.
Is it possible he hadn’t seen or sensed her? No.
She’d watched how he fought last night. He was incredibly strong in the force. If she, a failed Jedi who hadn’t trained in years, had managed to sense his presence, there was no way someone like him wouldn’t be aware of her. Even if by some miracle he hadn’t sensed her, he had to know she was here. After all, he was the one who brought her here.
The knowledge melts the ice in her veins and replaces it with molten fury.
Mae isn’t here.
The question that haunted her in the cave rises up once again to terrorize her.
What happened after Mae knocked her out?
Osha didn’t understand the reason behind it, but she had witnessed it with her own eyes. The man had attacked Mae with the same ferocity he’d gone after Sol with. Every slash of his saber burning with murderous intent. Had he succeeded? Was Mae dead? And Sol along with her?
The fury moves her frozen limbs. She is out of the waves and following the man.
The man ends his leisurely stroll at a calm cove. The massive black volcanic rocks surrounding the cove protect it from the violent waves and leave the emerald water crystal clear and calm. She hunkers behind a gathering of boulders and watches as he stops at the water’s edge, much like she had, to look out into the ocean.
He drops the bag he had slung over one shoulder to the ground and begins to disrobe.
Osha feels the natural urge to look away from a stranger’s nakedness but forces herself to keep her eyes on him. She can’t let him out of her sight for a second. Not when this man has a penchant for seemingly disappearing into thin air.
The man’s body is corded with taut and toned muscles. But what really catches her attention is the gnarled scar branching along his spine. Osha can’t take her eyes off it. It looks like a scar from a lightsaber, and yet, the shape of it is all wrong. She’d seen many lightsaber scars on Jedi when she was a padawan, but those scars had been small things from training or sparring accidents. A tiny straight slash on someone’s arm or leg. This scar wasn’t a small thing, and it wasn’t straight. Not an accident. Rather, it appeared purposeful and cruel.
The man…what name had he given them back on Olega? When he was still posing as nothing but a hapless and foolish smuggler. Qimir? Yes, that was it. She knew it must be an alias. There was no way a man like him, who’d even kept his true identity as her master from Mae, his own pupil, would’ve given his real name to the Jedi. But she had nothing else to call him.
She continued to watch as Qimir waded into the calm waters of the cove, his steps measured, until she could only see his head and shoulders. Then he swam out, until he was about a hundred feet from the shore. The fury inside her had ebbed somewhat at the sight of that cruel scar scrawled across his back, but as she watched him swim, his movements so fluid and relaxed, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, that fury returned with a vengeance.
This bastard had murdered Jecki. He’d snapped Yord’s neck like it was nothing right in front of her. He’d most likely murdered Mae and Sol as well. And now here he was, swimming naked in a beautiful cove, as if none of it had ever happened. Her grip tightens on her dagger.
She can’t let that stand.
But a dagger won’t do it. Not against this man.
Her eyes travel to the bag and robes he left on the shore.
There it is. Out in the open. Atop his folded robes.
His lightsaber.
At the sight of it she recalls the way it shone bright blood red in the dark. The heat of it at her back as it sliced through the air. The effortless grace of it in his hands as he cut down every single Jedi she’d arrived with until Sol was the only one left.
The fury inside flares again, hot and painful. There is sorrow too, but she buries it under the fury. She can’t let it breathe or she won’t be able to do what she needs to do.
Osha moves forward warily, her eyes never leaving his scarred back, her heart clenching when a rock crunches under her feet, until she can wrap a hand around the hilt. The lightsaber is warm in her palm. As she lifts it the weight is secure and familiar in her hand.
“How does it feel?”
Qimir’s words are as relaxed and confident as his movements.
He knew she was here the whole time. He let her take the lightsaber. He isn’t scared of her. Why should he be? She saw what he was capable of last night. If all those Jedi died at his hand, what chance did she have? He could kill her easy as breathing.
“Don’t move,” she orders anyway as she drops into fighting stance, the saber held firm in both her hands now. She hasn’t touched a lightsaber for six years, but all the same her body remembers what to do, as if she’d only been sparring with Sol yesterday.
He faces her now, his expression open and curious as he asks, “Feels good, doesn’t it? To hold one in your hand again. I assume you didn’t keep your own saber when you left the order.”
He doesn’t wait for an answer before he moves, ignoring her order, because why should he listen to her? His dark eyes are locked on her, but not with anger or threat. Rather, those dark eyes watch her with interest and expectation, as if he’s delighted by her presence here.
“Your stance is good,” he informs her as he glides forward, his arms creating small waves as they slice through the calm crystal-clear surface of the water. His amiable and encouraging tone reminds her of Sol during her padawan training. “You should keep your other elbow up higher, allows for a swifter block.”
He’s nearly reached the shore. She points the saber straight at him.
“Stay where you are.” By some miracle her voice comes out steady and strong, despite the hammering of her heart. This man didn’t hesitate to kill Jecki or Yord. She needs to strike him down while she has the chance, while he’s vulnerable. She might not get this chance again.
He holds up a pacifying hand. “If you’re not gonna join me,” he says this with the barest of smiles, “I’d like to put my clothes back on.” He points to his bag and then continues forwards.
He rises out of the emerald water without an ounce of modesty. The water ripples down and over his powerful physique as the sunlight shines in his wet black hair, which is secured back with a small side braid, only a few tendrils framing his face. As he advances closer, she retreats.
“You’re wondering if it’s honorable to kill me like this,” he says as he takes another step closer. His eyes are laser focused on her face. He’s as at ease now as he was earlier.
She takes another step back, her fingers tensing around the saber, itching to turn it on. She doesn’t do it. A Jedi doesn’t attack the unarmed. On Khofar, in that dense shadowed forest, she’d stopped Sol from doing that very thing. Then, she’d sicced those bugs on Qimir. Not very Jedi of her. Of course, she isn’t a Jedi. Not anymore. An old familiar anger simmers in her belly.
“Heat of battle,” he continues, “it’s justified, but a few hours later, it’s vengeance?” His head tilts as he asks the question, his brow furrowing slightly, as if genuinely wondering about the logic behind the concept. He bends down and grabs the set of clean white robes he’d left folded next to his bag. “Now you’re wondering how I can read your mind.”
She sucks in a breath but keeps quiet.
“I can’t,” he says with a small smile. “Not exactly. Your anger betrays your thoughts.”
Once again, he sounds like Sol. How many times had Sol told her variations of that very sentiment? That uncontrolled emotions, especially negative ones, clouded your mind and projected your intentions to others, especially in battle.
“Why bring me here?” The words are out before she can think them through. “Why not kill me? Am I supposed to be your prisoner?”
“Prisoner?” He repeats the word with a hint of laughter as he shrugs the white robes over his broad shoulders. “You’re the one with the weapon.” He pulls the robe closed over his chest, the fabric clinging somewhat to his wet golden skin. Then he bends to pick up his bag, taking his eyes off her for the first time since they started this conversation.
The anger in her belly flares sharper at his laughter and his lack of caution. He is either remarkably certain that she won’t kill him, or this man values life so little that even his own isn’t worth protecting in his eyes. “Did you kill Sol?” The question leaves her painfully, every syllable of it forced from her lips.
A small pause as he stops and then looks up at her from under his lashes with a new intensity in his dark eyes. “No.” The one word is clear and definitive. The truth.
The relief that blooms amid the anger, like a salve spread over a fresh burn, has her letting out an involuntary relieved breath. Sol is alive. She isn’t alone. But…. “Did you kill Mae?”
His brow furrows again as he shakes his head. Osha gets the distinct impression of disapproval. “No. Interesting you ask about him first though.”
The observation stings, even though it shouldn’t. Mae killed their family. Sol saved her, raised her, taught her. He should come first. And yet, the sting of guilt.
One born as two.
Qimir continues with his unasked-for observations. “He taught you the Jedi arts.” He smiles again and this time it’s a knowing smile as he looks directly into her eyes, then nods a little. “But he’s more to you than that.” He slings his bag over his shoulder. “A special relationship, isn’t it?” He circles her now and she moves with him, not letting him get behind her. “Master and pupil.” Then he walks past her, turning his back on her, to head in the direction he came from.
She watches his retreating back as she drops out of fighting stance, her arms at her sides, the lightsaber now held limply in one hand. What does this man want from her? Why is he acting this way? So different from how he was on Khofar, or even Olega.
She follows him, because what else is there to do?
They walk in silence, Qimir in front, Osha behind, out of strike range, the crunching of rocks under foot and the roar of waves crashing along the coastline the only sounds between them, until the cave comes into view. She speaks then, because something has been bothering her.
“You speak as if you were a Jedi.”
“I was,” he answers without hesitation. “A long time ago.”
“I’ve never heard of you,” she accuses in disbelief, despite that he really did speak as if he’d been a Jedi once. But a powerful fallen Jedi who’d turned to the darkside? If that were true, wouldn’t that be a story told to every Jedi and padawan? A cautionary tale meant to teach of the dangers of indulging the darkness within. If it were true, but secret, what did that mean?
“It was a really long time ago,” he replies vaguely. It’s clear from his distant and blunt tone he doesn’t intend to reveal more than that.
Osha frowns. He looks to be in his early thirties. It couldn’t have been that long ago. Although, that scar on his back. It did look old. Somehow, she knew that scar was integral to who he was and why he was living like this.
A scar like that changed your life.
The thought has her remembering the wound at her side. The bandaged wound.
This man tended to her injury while she was unconscious instead of killing her, and then left her unattended in his bed. In his home. Her fingers flex around the hilt of his saber. What kind of cold-blooded killer leaves his greatest weapon in the hands of his enemy? It’s so strange.
She can’t understand his motivations or actions.
“Why’d you bring me here?”
“Why do you think?” He instantly asks in return.
“Leverage,” she says, because nothing else makes sense. He must intend to use her.
He glances over his shoulder as he continues across the beach. “Everyone does seem to want you,” he says musingly, as if he isn’t sure exactly why this is the case, even as he includes himself among those who want her.
“If you keep me here, Sol comes to you. He’s found me before, and his strength in the force is very powerful,” she says the last as almost a threat. After all, Sol bested him on Khofar. It was only due to her interference that this man was even still alive. She’d seen it in Sol’s eyes. He would have killed Qimir then and there if she hadn’t called out to stop him.
Qimir stops and turns to face her with a renewed intensity shining in his dark eyes as he asks, “You think that’s his strength?” Those heated dark eyes roam her face intimately, as if searching for something. “That’s your strength in the force, Osha. Someone ought to teach you that.”
Osha doesn’t know how to respond to that. Her strength? What did that even mean? Sol was the strong one. He always had been. And she had failed him, because she wasn’t the same.
Qimir pointed to the small island off the coast, where his starship was parked. “I’d start swimming if you want to make it to the ship before sundown. Or you could wait for the tide to go out.” He says it all so easily, and yet she can hear the challenge behind his simple words.
Will you be strong and swim? Or will you be weak and wait?
Then he offers a third option.
“You hungry?”
The question is as much a challenge as the first two options.
He doesn’t wait for an answer and instead continues back to the cave.
She looks out to sea. The waves aren’t as huge or menacing as they were earlier. She stalks into the cold water with the old familiar anger boiling over in her core to scald her insides as she throws herself into the waves. She can be strong. She can make it.
The current is stronger.
Every time she makes progress it drags her back kicking and screaming towards the shore as waves endlessly crash over her head and leave her breathless and desperate. She reaches for the force with that desperation. She knows that if she can connect with it that it will buoy her in the waves and give her the extra push that she needs to fight the strong current keeping her trapped. She reaches and reaches, grasping with everything inside, but there is nothing there to hold onto. Nothing there to catch her as she falls. Sol isn’t here. She’s alone.
She doesn’t know how long she struggles alone in the cruel waves before collapsing in exhaustion on the hard stones of the beach, chest heaving and limbs aching. The clear blue sky is beautiful above her. She watches as a sea bird soars overheard. She wishes she were that bird.
She’s not. She can’t fly. She can’t change who she is. All she can do is stare up uselessly at that beautiful unreachable blue as a bleak certainty washes over her. She is not strong.
She is weak.
And yet his words ring in her head.
That’s your strength in the force, Osha. Someone ought to teach you that.
She turns her face from the bleak vast blue to the endless variations of gray that make up the stone beach. There it is where she dropped it earlier, nestled among the grays. His lightsaber.
She storms into the cave, still drenched in sea water, and demands, “What did you mean, my strength in the force?”
He’s crouched by the pot of simmering soup she’d been tempted by when she awoke earlier. “Exactly that,” he tells her, answering without missing a beat as he stirs the soup, as if he always expected her to follow him and ask this precise question.
“If you were a Jedi,” she hisses with contempt, “you’d know it’s something you must exercise. Without training, it fades.”
“And that’s what they told you.” There is an undercurrent of disdain in his words. “The Jedi teach there’s only one way to access the force, and if you don’t do it their way, it fades.” He dips a finger into the soup and then licks it to taste. “But there is another way.”
He looks to her now and the same intensity from the beach is in his dark eyes.
“Below the surface of consciousness are powerful emotions. Anger. Fear. Loss.” He gazes directly into her eyes. She returns the stare, unwilling to look away and let him win. The intensity in his eyes softens into seduction as he finishes with a last softly spoken, “Desire.”
“That’s the path to the darkside,” Osha answers instantly, the sentiment trained rigorously into her as a padawan by Sol and all the other Masters, even as she can feel the swirl of every emotion he listed deep in her gut.
Those emotions haven’t left her for even one day since what happened on Brendok sixteen years ago. Anger at Mae. The loss of her mother and the coven. Fear of what would become of her now that everything she knew was gone. Her desire to be her own person, to be different and separate from Mae. Her desire to be better than Mae, who was always the talented one. Her desire to forge her own path by becoming a Jedi. By becoming Sol’s padawan. Her fear of disappointing him. Her desire to be strong. Anger at herself because she couldn’t do it. The loss of all her hopes and dreams when she had to admit to herself that she couldn't do any of it.
He fills a bowl with soup and shrugs with a single word of refute, “Semantics.” He stands, the bowl in his hands, and approaches her.
“You murdered my friends,” she bites out between clenched teeth. That old anger is once again boiling in her belly.
“I killed Jedi,” he counters. “I killed those who threaten my existence.”
“You killed Yord.”
“A man who didn’t hesitate to turn you in for a crime you didn’t commit.”
Osha had been so happy on the Trade Federation ship when Yord first came into her quarters. They’d been close as padawans. She’d thought he was there to visit her, even though she should’ve known better. Once she left The Order not once had any of the Jedi she’d trained with or known contacted or come to see her. Including Sol. She vividly remembers the detachment in Yord’s eyes as he questioned her, as if she were a stranger, rather than an old friend.
“You killed Jecki,” she condemns with new conviction. Jecki had been innocent. Jecki had been nothing but kind to her. Jecki didn’t deserve to die.
“And where did you think that was going to go? You would have had the same relationship with her that you have with your Master. One-sided.” He pauses, once again looking deep into her eyes. She still doesn’t look away. She can’t, absorbed by the incongruous softness she sees there in his dark gaze. This man is a ruthless killer. She knows that. And yet, there is none of that in his eyes as he looks at her. There is only that softness. That…desire.
“Why do you love people who can only go so far?” His voice is as soft as his eyes as he holds out the steaming bowl to her. An offer. “Who can’t go as deep as you can?”
Her eyes narrow at his implication. At the insult and bold audacity of his offer. “I’m not my sister,” she refuses, her fingers tightening painfully around the hilt of the lightsaber. “I’m not that easily corrupted.” She turns her back on him and storms out of the cave the way she came in.
She halts at the top of the steep stone steps leading down to the beach in order to look out over the ocean. The sun has started its slow descent in the sky and the late daylight reflects off the hull of the starship on that island that is so close and yet so far. The relentless waves are still crashing. She doesn’t know what she hoped to learn by coming back here and talking with him.
He is a murderer. He can’t teach her anything.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
She can’t help but turn to look at him.
He leans languidly against the stone wall of the cave entrance, but as their eyes meet, he straightens to approach her. “You stayed here to do something.” She holds her ground as he comes closer and closer, only raising the saber so it’s between them, a barrier. “Do it,” he says, only stopping once the tip of the saber touches his stomach. He takes hold of the hilt, his hand above hers. “Turn it on.”
“A Jedi doesn’t attack the unarmed,” she says automatically as she attempts to pull away.
He grabs her, his grip strong on her arm, keeping the saber jabbed into his vulnerable abdomen. “Why do you still think of yourself as a Jedi? They didn’t want you.” His voice trembles the littlest bit in emotion on those last four words. What emotion exactly, she isn’t sure.
“That’s not true,” she denies. “I left.”
“Why?”
“Because I chose to.” She tries to pull away again, but he won’t let her. One wrong move and he’ll be speared through with burning red.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Let me go!” She yanks at the saber and manages to point it upwards, away from his stomach. Still, he has a tight hold on her and the saber, and pulls her close, against his chest, so the saber is still trapped between them as he stares into her eyes.
“What you’re feeling right now,” he tells her softly, “this anger, this pain, this is who you are. The Jedi saw it, and that’s why they threw you away.”
“They didn’t throw me away.” The denial is belied by the waver in her voice and the angry tears springing unbidden to her eyes.
“Then why aren’t you a Jedi?” He waits, but she doesn’t answer, so he asks again, his voice not challenging like earlier on the beach, but compassionate. “Why aren’t you a Jedi, Osha?”
At the sound of her name spoken so gently from the lips of this dangerous and infuriating man the last of her composure crumbles. “Because I failed!”
As she screams the confession, she manages at last to rip herself away from his grasp. In the same motion, she turns on the saber. The red of the blade burns in the air as she slams him into the cave wall. He lets her, succumbing without struggle as she presses the blade to his throat, her breathing ragged. He gazes down at her, the burning red reflecting in his black eyes.
“I understand,” he tells her, voice still soft. “I lost everything, Osha. But when you lose everything,” he raises a hand and gently places it on her arm. “That’s when you’re finally free.” He doesn’t attempt to stop her from holding the saber to his throat, but instead only holds her.
She stares into his face as her breathing slows. This is the first time she’s getting a look at him from this close and she can’t help but be aware of the angular beauty of his face. He is undeniably a beautiful person. A beautiful person who can kill easy as he can comfort.
Because that’s what he’s doing, she realizes. He is comforting her. What kind of person is he? What kind of person comforts the person holding a lightsaber to their throat? What kind of person dares someone to kill them? Did he think she wouldn’t do it? Or does he want her to do it?
What does he want from her? What does she….
Yes. That’s right. He isn’t the only want who wants something. She wants something from him too. That’s why she came back here to this cave. To him.
She steps away from him, turning the saber off, the red blade retracting into the hilt in an instant. He lets her go without a word. She doesn’t understand him. She doesn’t understand herself. She should kill him.
Instead, she runs down the stone steps.