#As'traa Tabris

[theworstjedi]

The Kyber Lining

The funny thing about confronting the Force in a cave was that the aftermath was disconcertingly calm when one walked out of the Nexus. Friyr had always wondered what would happen if he let the Force pour in to the brink of surreality again, to feel that painfully close to something both greater than the sum of the galaxy and pitched to a feverish omniscience. The answer seemed to be nothing more than an experience that had left him when he had left the cave.

Though of course, She hadn’t. She was here in the lake, lapping at shore, and at the same time the creature shuffling through the sand. Friyr pulled off his boots and dug his toes in. It was the time of day when the coarse warmth was pleasant instead of scorching. It was solid, real, and he needed that more than he needed anything else.

NM was nowhere to be found; the return of the small party had likely interrupted the boredom shutdown he’d been trying to sneak all afternoon, which left Friyr to navigate the beach alone. It was cursory at this point in his life to just grab a practice blade, branch, discarded metal, whatever was near and probe the with the tip as he walked.

There was a light in the distance, and people. Tired muscles carried him there, following the suggestion in the grounded advice of the sand to seek warmth in the only unparched place in this heatstroke of a desert. The voices told Friyr that they belonged to Dontorii and the mirialan master. As’traa.

“Kayin got a meal, and now he’s resting,” she was saying. The statement was punctuated by a sigh. “That was… taxing to say the least.”

The least. Yes, that would’ve been the least. Friyr half wanted to discard the voices into the general ambiance of the oasis and let the Force take him through the repetitive motions of running his tongue over the pulpy edges of false memories imbued by the cave. But Friyr had never been one to nurse bruises, especially his own. He twisted his head toward the pair standing off the side; their silhouettes licked by the glow of fire in the night.

“You seem to be doing okay Friyr,” Dontorii said at the same time Friyr unstuck his throat enough to say, “How’s he?”

Their words ran together, but Friyr’s brain was working quickly, far too quickly. It grasped Dia’s statement and had formulated a tree of answers, all of which were deflective.

“Throat’s killing me, yah. Wha’bout you guys?” he settled on. His  already thick Core accent somehow reaching the consistency of disingenuous molasses.

“He’s exhausted,” As’traa responded first. Her tone sounding like the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll. “I’ve no idea how long he was in that desert with only Rejjaet to care for him. “As for me…” The irritation left her tone. Everything left her tone including her voice – which was lost somewhere in the waves. Friyr understood the feeling more than he sometimes cared to.

“I’ll be fine,” Dontorii said in As’traa’s silence. Always diplomatic. Always level-headed, but the twist of the Force around him suggested the answer was more apprehensive than truthful. “Since that cave was such a… trial for all of us. I think it was the equivalent of the crystal caves on Illum. Master Tabris, do you think Friyr and Ylri deserve their lightsaber crystals?”

Brought back to the conversation by her name, the normally firm direct master hummed absently. “Oh, yes. If their visions were anything like mine, they more than earned them.”

Dontorii had steered the conversation in directions faster than Friyr had anticipated, which sent his overdriven mind reeling. It was a skill of the older Jedi and one that Friyr recognized as the a hallmark of an experienced leader type. Not always the easiest people to navigate, but with a little investment and time, it was easy to leverage.

“You don’t gotta give us story time,” Friyr cleared some husk from his throat, then plastered a polite smile on his face. “But nah, I didn’t do anything. I can wait ‘til Illum. Really.”

“It may not be traditional, but the Force works in mysterious ways. There is little point in sending you to Illum after what happened in that cave.” Friyr heard the crunch of the sand and the vague shape of Dontorii sharpened as he closed the small gap between them. “Stand up padawan.”

Friyr’s eyebrows popped. “Wait—wha—I—" The surprise on his face looked a little wild against the shell-shock. Friyr stood, beating sand from the soft leather of his pants.

Dontorii pulled something from the inside of his plain brown robes, and although Friyr couldn’t see it, he could feel it. Smooth and empty but the only ultimate purity in the galaxy and perhaps the next dimension over, if Kayin was to be believed. “This is the Kyber crystal; the heart of the blade;”

Friyr knew relatively little about the gathering, besides what Dontorii had told them. He had listened but the topic interested him little; the glamor of a lightsaber wore after the first wide eyed trial of endurance he’d come back half dead and all sorts of bloody from eleven years ago. The Jedi ritual of building a lightsaber presenting a different challenge than wresting it from the hands of your dead and yet undead betters, but the ends were ultimately the same. A weapon.

“The heart is the crystal of the Jedi;”

And a fragment of soul. Living Force. The Jedi is the crystal of the Force. Friyr had fought for the right to such a privileged weapon - something that many would and did kill for. The Force is the blade of the heart. His mark as a Force User. All are intertwined. To be handed the very heart of a blade he hadn’t held in quite some time and would one day hold again forged by his own hand, felt too easy. The crystal, the blade, the Jedi. His time with the Jedi had emphasized an unforgivable forgiveness the Sith dogmatically purged from their apprentices, lest weakness be their undoing. We are one.

As Friyr thumbed over a smooth facet of Kyber handed to him, unable to deny that the Jedi built themselves from the weakest emotion that a Sith could perhaps offer and found enough fortitude not to give. If he’d seen an example of tenacity, it was what they had all endured in that Force haunted cave gaping, like a wound, from Ambria’s bedrock.

“Here is your homework: I want you to figure out what those words mean. When you do, go to your crystal and meditate on it. You’ll know the true meaning of that poem once the crystal gains a color. Then come back to me for the next step.”

Friyr swallowed the urge to say What’s a color? And instead, the strangest smile on his face and the feeling that he might understand an inkling of the words already, threw his arms around Dontorii and all his composure – who chuckled but took it well in stride. The hug was the most honest expression Friyr knew of.

“Thank you. I mean that. More than anything I’ve said tonight,” Friyr paused, “Or the last two days.”

[theworstjedi]

What Happens in Hutt Domain...

Have you ever seen those holovids that where the hero wakes up to see the ceiling and there’s this loud ringing sound? Neither have I. Mostly ‘cause I can’t see. Though not for a lack of trying!

I’m the hero in this one. (Naturally), and when I woke up all I knew was that I lost time, someone had punched my jaw back into place (Thanks fer that), and I was incredibly aroused.

Hey, hey, heyyy. George. George lookit me. It’s not that kinda story. I mean if ya really wanted—okay okay come back! I’m done. Prahmise.

I’m not unused to wakin’ up sticky and sore, but I’m not usually covered in Hutt slime, blood, and like prahbably a few bad decisions.

----

“I think he’s coming to.”

Friyr licked a line of drool from his mouth that had long since dampened his shirt beneath. Funny. Considering his mouth was dry. The thick mucus strings tasted like he’d he’d sucked on a perfumed hutt.

Wait. Friyr blinked. His jaw muscle memory recalled thick blubber slicing beneath his incisors as he kicked at the floor. He’d been beat until tender and was suffocating underneath the weight of an overgrown slug and and the idocy of not knowing when to quit. Friyr wretched and coughed up another wave of mucus that slid down his chin. He smelled blood, though the distinct taste wasn’t in his mouth.

He liked to call this tenacity.

He exhaled and propped his hand against padding of the seat he was sprawled on, like some sort of inelegant ragdoll in pleather a size too tight. He had intended to push himself into a sitting position, but he groaned through his teeth instead as pain lanced through battered bones. Friyr exhaled. His chest was tight and a dull ache in his ribs promised to keel him over if he tried to find his footing.

“Aya aliyana su, Friyr. Rua khoe Su uchu ik wich'a kho p'u?”

Green. Way too much green. If she was wearing a shirt at all, it was a flimsy one. He could feel that from the soft echoes of their voices, though right now? That could’ve been the sound floating in and out of his head.

Friyr scoffed and spat foul fluid out. “Did-- did I win, Master Tabris?”

“Well, you’re not dead, so I—” The alien words still had her tongue twisted around.

“Are you proud of me?” he asked. His jaw moved awkwardly. Either the numbness in his cheek was swelling or someone had finally chipped it back into place.  

“I—Padawan, of course I’m—” as Master Tabris flustered, the sound ebbed out of Friyr’s ears in favor of a deeper ringing. He couldn’t feel his body. Taking advantage of the numbness, he moved his hand to the part of his face that was suspiciously and pleasantly hot. They came back wet from the stream of blood pouring from his left eye.

He grinned and laughed in blissful forgetfulness. He didn’t manage a wheeze before the burgeoning pain in his ribs kicked him, like a mule, and Friyr’s pretty blue eyes rolled back.

___

When he woke up next his master wasn’t there, nor was he in pleather. Someone (Tabris, likely) had stripped him out of it and replaced his normal green robes and sandals. His ears were still ringing, but the volume was much lower. He was no longer covered in hutt slime. He blinked and touched his face. Nor blood. The ceiling was a blurry gunmetal gray instead of the neon red of artificial lights. Friyr swallowed and winced around the aftertaste of Hutt butt.

“If I ever get my schutta together,” Friyr began to promise, “I’ll never ever get into a ring fight in a sketchy Wild Space bar again.”

He tested the dry words, seeing how they felt in the moment after regret, like the morning after a bad one night stand. Friyr hummed. “Probably not,” he said.

The remnants of an Imperial accent laced the last two words then fell silent. His throat felt like wind tunnel. He hurt like he’d been runover by a Harrower class Dreadnaught (ironically the model of ship that had been appropriated by the elements that had moved in when the Imperials had moved out.)

“Faaarkle,” he groaned and rubbed out a messy blotch of eyeliner and wheezed out a laugh. His ribs kicked his again, but the pain wasn’t so bad now. It’d probably been a day gauged by the fading bite of his bruises and the recalcitrant brittleness of his bones.

He pushed himself up, and the world spun. He caught himself on the arm of a couch and held in a late wave of vomit. Run over by a Harrower? Kriffed by a Gundark? …Sat on by a Hutt? Two lies one truth.

Ever since Friyr was little, he had had vivid daydreams that he remembered with a clarity he barely remembered his younger life in Kaas City’s slave barracks with. He’d entertained private fantasies of blaster slinging in the Outer Rim. The place where he thought outlaw heroes were born. The part of the Outer Rim that didn’t belong to Imperial space anyway. He was wild and free hunting bounties, taking mercenary contracts. Maybe he wasn’t the hero. Not in a classical sense anyway, but he could spin stories to the tune of those imagined adventures.

He caught the shuffling and clink of glass outside of his own sustained misery and listened to the rustle of another human being….alien? Didn’t matter. It was grounding, and Friyr couldn’t really dwell on living out some of his rough and tumble fantasies. He needed to find a Jedi’s headspace, a servant’s discipline and pick himself up. He straightened. SOmething popped; he really wasn’t in his twenties anymore, huh?            “Hulloooo~?” Friyr called out.

“That’s a bold choice of robes,” a decidedly male voice answered with a familiar undercurrent of calm that Friyr was used to finding in a certain order of monks.

“What’d ya mean?” Friyr said as he limped his way over to the bar. Oh, a three person barfight wasn’t glamourous.

Things had changed as he’d grown and reality had imposed its bleak choices on him instead. Force sensitive, low caste, and between a rock and the ire of a Sith Lord Master – Friyr had absolved debts at Korriban. No one had told him it’d cost his soul, but— he nicked a bottle from behind the counter, both eyebrows raised – Everyone made decisions. He wasn’t particularly remorseful for trading in morality to save his life. He’d…ended up in the right place? Right?

“In robing of a color that isn’t black?”

“Oh!” Friyr grinned, and it winged. “The guy who gave this t’me had a terrible thing fer green. It was all he wore. Green Jedi? Y’know?”

Friyr pressed a hand to his jaw to see if he could jank it back into the position it’d occupied before. Gratned, it had been in the wrong position before from the first person who’d forced it out of place; Friyr had just...kind of gotten used to it. The tender edges of a suspiciously deep bruise deterred him. Well. There was the answer as to why it was off its misalignment, but what specifically-- The memory of a large red woman snapping his chin upward with enough force to rocket him back to the Empire careened into his waking thoughts. Ah. Riiight.

“I’ve never met any Green Jedi. I’m of the Tython Temple. If that still stands.”

Focus, said the voice of every Jedi Master Friyr had ever had in varying degrees of patience…exasperation.

“Dunno why it wouldn’ be.” He pulled the cork out with his teeth and spat it. (Ow, jaw) Drink. The bitter cut of alcohol woke his bleary sense for a moment. Friyr wiped the spirit from his face and listened to the voice he’d made the aquiantence of. A sharp restlessness took the former Sith’s bones for better or worse. Friyr considered his options, that which was most constructive. “Are you—y’know--?” He tilted his head suggestively.

“Jedi Pathfinder Lincen Namara, of what remains of the Jedi Exploration Corps…”

“Oh, I was gonna ask if y’were gay.” Friyr took another pull and set the bottle down. “’Cause yer inna gay bar.” Friyr held out a hand. “Fryer. ‘M a padawan.”

___

“Do I want to ask where you were?”

Master Tabris’ voice had a disapproving bent from down the corridor. Friyr was…limping again, but the reason he can’t quite walk straight? That’s entirely different.

“Calm yourself!” He called out. His own voice was dangerously sober and straightened from it’s usual teasing wobble. Friyr’s head buzzed pleasantly with healing injury and… distraction, but he felt oddly in control of his own destiny at the moment.

As he met his master down the hallway his eyebrows popped up silent question. He forewent words. Her body heat was close to his and her silence was still considering his sudden reappearance and calm condition.

His head cocked. “You sound like you have more clothes on?” Indeed the reverberations of sound are crisper, not like when they echoed off of bare skin. He grimaced to bite back a reflexive smirk. He wasn’t feeling it at the moment.

“I just—you’re very quiet.” She felt his forehead, and Friyr leaned his head into the cupped hand obligingly. “And you were gone from the bar when I checked back tonight.”

“Haaa, riiight. I uh—went on a ride?”

“On an enclosed ship?” she asked skeptically. 

“Yup.” Friyr popped the ‘p.’

His makeup, the little that remained was smeared, like a teeage girl after her first broken heart. But only at the edges. Most had been cleaned off or wiped clear at this point. Friyr rocked on his heels as he parted his lips and decided on the persona he wanted to wear on the way back. He decided he didn’t particularly want to talk about it.

His mood wasn’t dark. Not at the moment. He’d safely sealed himself back inside his body and shuttered his connection from the Force. By all means he was cozy. Friyr just didn’t want to. Not before he had time to process the last seventy-two hours of his life.

“Dooon’t” he started to drawl with as much curling satisfaction he could muster. His eyes narrowed mischievously as he put on an entirely ‘you know what I did last night’ expression on the set of his brows and the quirk of his mouth. “Don’ ask questions ya don’ wan the answer to~” The hastily skewed robes, the somewhat awkward waddle, and the word ‘ride’ pieced together into perfect awful sense for his poor master in the silence that followed. His wide mouth stretched in anticipation, and Master Tabris disappoint. She groaned. Loudly.

“I don’t know why I ask.” Her boots click across the floor as she marched off, leaving Friyr to trail behind her.

Friyr chuckled. “’Cause ya caaaare about meeee,” he teased, as though her motherly attachment to him were as juvenile as a crush.

He wasn’t going to pretend they had a normal mentorship. The Sunriders... their littany of attachments made messes for them, and Master Tabris’ had hit her hard. He’d met her late husband, had heard about the littany of cheating, profession of love, held their child’s hand through the desert and caried her on his shoulders. Master Rajjaet Or’blanc was top shelf scum. Sure, Friyr had liked him for the Jedi he had been, but Friyr was also woefully aware this didn’t negate the way he’d used and abused his family. Friyr, afterall, was very much the same as a partner, better in some ways - worse in others.

Jedi weren’t made for relationships, but it was perhaps the crisis that As’traa Tabris’ old one wrecked through her middle age that suited her to Friyr. They were a mess and perhaps Friyr’s ability to own his predilections that stripped As’traa of this painful veneer of togetherness she tried to maintain when she was boiling inside.

In a way? He and Tabris were both trying to learn how to be Jedi; he just needed help more than she did.

“I don’t know why I do!” There’s the hint of a laugh in her voice.

“’m glad y’came with me…” he tried for instead. Sobriety returned now that she’d been deflected from his personal affairs.

“I—I am too Padawan.” Tabris’ voice cracked, and Friyr understood in the deepest recesses of his soul why. He felt sorry for her, a man removed from his own heartache looking in on anothers.

They walked in silence for long moments of durasteel and litter crunching on retreating boots.

“’M goin’ to remake my lightsaber. The one I have now.”

“I’m proud of you, padawan,” she said again, and Friyr gave her a difficult smile but an appreciative one nonetheless.

[theworstjedi]

Conquer Attachments

Friyr hefted the sack of feed over his good shoulder and waited for his ‘deficiencies’ to catch up. It was almost dusk, and the light waned low but still bright. On Kaas, it would’ve been pitch by now, but Ambria was merely a filtered low gray. Friyr didn’t depend on sight anymore than a Miraluka did. The dirt smelled pungent from the heat rapidly cooling the sand as though bringing out the smell of the musty underlayers. It coated his nose and made it dry. He carried grain into the storage sheds, while dragging his limp left foot in a trail behind him. The instep pressed into the dirt, which wedged into a clod in his sandal. It made the connection between his hip to his knee to the ground firmer than if he tried to support it on a flat sole.

Water lapped in his ears, and the oro-birds’ racous clucking settled into a murmur. Nights on Ambria were silent. Friyr knelt onto on knee and heaved the bag forward over his shoulder, almost going prostrate as he used his full body for what would’ve taken only the upper arms for a normal man.

“I can’t do it yet, Master.”

Elutherius’ skin burned. He didn’t need sight to know his wrists were a raw red, blistered bubbling on the surface of a red tattoo shaped into the Imperial seal. The palms of both of his hands felt raw where the edges of the lightsaber pressed into his skin. He resisted the urge to manacle his hands around them and rub the ache away.

“Look at me.”

Elutherius lifted his head in the gray darkness to the hulking silhouette.

“Look at me.”

Elutherius closed his eyes, pulled the weariness from his bones, like Quirt had asked just one more thing of him on an already bone-weary day, and drew in a shaking draught of Force.

When he opened them, his vision flickered blearily between the lines of blindness and unnatural sight that the rods and cones should never have been capable of. Blurred watercolor blended with sharp seven feet lines of wine-dark Massassi.

Elutherius met the yellow eyes.

“Good, Apprentice. Explain why you can’t.”

His Master’s tone was sharp. Businesslike. Urgent.

Elutherius was seventeen, though he looked younger than that.

“I need a smoother grip to fit my hands and—” Elutherius pulled his shirt up without a lingering trace of shyness for his body. He caught a glance at his hard but gawky teenage muscles fit on a slender frame still filling out and at the same time losing the last bits of babyfat clinging to the Korriban sinew. He was smooth. Pale. New blemishes of spotty brown freckled over his stomach and shoulders but they were healing into peeling skin. A few, very few pink scars traced what had been deep scabby gashes over his ribs.  They caved in as though broken and unset in healing, like his face. A warped dip.

“—and this. This hurts when I move. It makes it harder to do.”

The Massassi gazed at him a few seconds, and Elutherius met it unabashed. He took out his lightsaber and flipped it in his broad, thick, four fingered claws. “Apprentice.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“When I ask for an explanation, I expect it to be one we can both work with to overcome. Do I look like a medic?”

“No, my Lord.”

The Massassi turned on his lightsaber and raked a line down Friyr’s ribs with the tip. A loud sound filled the Apprentice’s ears. It was elegant really, like drawing a red strike through in pen that severed only cloth and cooking muscle but not bone.

Elutherius collapsed to his knees, registering that the sound was him screaming, and he lurched forward onto his hands, feeling his torso sag below his trembling shoulders and his Lord unkitted him. The heat built in a flash, never relenting, and it was only until his chest hit the floor, that he realized his Master had stabbed the lightsaber into his side, wrapping the wounded parts of him from the front of his the chest to the backs of his shoulders in a searing band.

“Give me an explanation,” Elutherius made out as tears fogged his eyes and the unnatural vision dissipated with them, but rather writhed within him as his tried to admit defeat. To curl up.

“I can do it I can do it I can I can--!”

The red beam retracted from the side of his vision, and everything went dark.

“I can do… it.”

“Good. Then get up and do it.”

Elutherius pushed himself to his feet, black eating the edges of his vision. Hearing began to turn from solid sounds, to faint liquid echoes. He fell again, smacking his chin on the metal of the landing pad. Something cracked. He tasted blood.

“There is a penalty for making me empty promises, Apprentice.”

Elutherius fought for consciousness. To stand before he was punished, but the lightsaber flared, and he felt the burn as more of him cauterized against his will, his helplessness used against him. This time. This time. He knew the screams were his own.

The shed was cool. Dark. Empty. Friyr slid his fingers under his shirt. He couldn’t feel much through the smooth scars in either his hand or side. A faint pressure of five tips, but—nothing more. Lord Ignolis couldn’t hurt nerve endings he’d permanently burned away. Friyr traced that absence methodically until his knees protested against the rough wooden floor. He staggered to his feet using the wall.

He dropped his hand from under his shirt and sighed. In time he’d learned through struggling and curling on the ground how to fight back, and eventually the Force buoyed him to his feet. Wicked and dark. There had been many more punishments.

Some of them had been his own errors, as he threw the debilitated side forward, letting people carve him because the scarred tissue was that thick. Their throats constricted in fear because he could take it. Without that he was just… Friyr flexed his arm into a curl and felt the deep current of numbness run down it. He suspected a muscle in his shoulder had been cut, but he couldn’t be sure.

Without the Force, Friyr was disabled. His ability had always been achy, limited, and he’d enjoyed building his strength past what people expected. He’d enjoyed getting stronger, but not by feeding on the Force. Not like this. No amount of muscle or hard work would fix the permanence of this.

Friyr left the shed and locked it up. He locked the Oro-bird coops. He heard the crunch of the dry dirt and the drag of his other foot through it. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. Not about that. He’d find a way. He always did.

“If you work with me, I’ll work with you, Teran! That’s all I ask! Kriff, I won’t even fight you about the med bay anymore!”

Friyr stopped outside his shed and looked up at the sky. It was a filtered gray pink that hurt his eyes.

When Teran had left, Friyr had expected it. His days on Tython had been sunlit and lonely as any Jedi milling around the half-bombed out temple had avoided him. Teran said he suspected Friyr was his purpose, that he’d had a feeling. Friyr, of course, had learned not to trust people a long time ago. They always had their own ends, even types like the Jedi that clung to altruism. They just didn’t realize what their own ends were.

But a feeling. Friyr trusted the Force, if not the headstrong, cocky, acrobatic-obsessed, young Jedi – who preferred to dance among the stars, rather than spend time with his Padawan on the ground. That was—fine. It was supposed to have been fine because Friyr didn’t trust people with red-hair and a way-ward temper because they loved falling into that stereotype.

Friyr snorted. Everybody knew the one.

But Teran had left a sizable hole, that Friyr had stumbled through into freefall. Stupidly trying to control his decent. People didn’t stick around. Jedi were afraid with people touched by darkness. It was stupid to trust that he’d stay, and Friyr didn’t expect As’traa to either. She needed the encouragement that she could do this more than he needed to know that she’d fail him as a Master.

She’d get him a new lightsaber; he’d understand what the hullabaloo was about, and he could ask questions along the way. She’d get what she wanted; Friyr wouldn’t have to form another…attachment.

“I liked Tython, but I knew too that was an attachment.”

Friyr had a smaller trail of people who had abandoned him, died, or had used him than most. Most dragged trains of flesh and tears behind them, but that didn’t make it easy for him to maintain.

Slavery was a hard profession. He’d learned how to serve someone without being too invested, to separate his thoughts form his work, to find moments of acceptable pleasure and indulge them while remaining impartial.

“It is control of your emotions Jedi emphasize not…not having them at all.”

“Slaves too, Lockham; slaves too,” Friyr sighed and let a warm wind carry his words away.

“This is… problematic for some. Like yourself, I suspect.”

When Friyr was around fourteen, he had fallen in love with a boy. Probably the second one he could remember loving. When Friyr was fourteen, he’d been a slave. When Friyr was fourteen, he already knew his chances were nil. His ability to desire, love, crave affection were broken in by the training he’d voluntarily submitted to and the years of service, since before he’d started losing teeth. Since he was a child with no food. It had been a wise decision, and it remained one. Slaves didn’t feel love at the same luxury that everyone else did. When people held food, comfort, and liberty over ones head, they fell victim to affection, false ploys of tenderness, and that was why Friyr had been a good slave. A clever one. Because he knew about this weakness, not because he’d been above it.

He balanced himself, he gained footing in the political game by using his master. When he’d fallen in love, he’d dealt with it. Managed it. When he’d became a Sith. Well…

He watched that boy grow into a man, Apprenticed under his father, and the future of having a title, land, a future beyond a well-fed death under someone else’s servitude was finally his; it had been all he’d ever wanted. As a Sith, he’d allowed himself, finally, the small luxury of uncalculating an emotion never meant for an equation. He’d allowed himself to soften control. He’d allowed himself not just indulgence of love but indulgence to create lasting connections beyond his own benefit.

Elutherius couldn’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday. Most people forgot most errant things, such as lunches. But then again, Elutherius hadn’t remembered anything for a long time except the voice of the Force, painful and beautiful in paradox, she shifted between acerbic mocking tones, paragraphs crusted in old blood, hungry pleads for fresh wounds, and soft decay. It was hard to hear anything else when she filled Elutherius’ head, drifting into different pitches as easily as a kaleidoscope did patterns. He felt compelled to listen to these echoes that had no true sound or language, deriving his life by the echoes of what might be his own mortality.

She spoke often about that in ways he heard clearly, like darkness pressing in on his eyes. She spoke about the end of things, and he understood the way the words fell from her lips like so much rot. If only because, latently, he was included in it. It was as though someone had locked eyes with him, while speaking on something otherwise innocuous seeming to the room at whole. All things worldly came to an end, but Elutherius had a sinking feeling she watched him in particular. The way scavengers did men on their way to death.

The world…sort of passed by. He listened, but he was unconscious of his own role in it. One day phasing from a moment of clarity in a towering mansion of cold metal the next across town and shivering in the middle of a warm rainfall having a familiar conversation.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said. Again.

Rivulets of grease ran down her face. Elutherius watched the trails through the yellow incandescence of his unnaturally lit and unnaturally sighted eyes. Dead eyes. He appreciated the detail, even if it was something so unappealing such as filth from an unwashed slave just finished her duties.

The balcony railing pressed into his forearms as they leaned against it, staring out into the dark silhouettes of thick foliage and canopy watching taxis go by to avoid looking at each other. The city dropped below.

Elutherius’ lips, heavily scarred from the trenches he’d carved into them, stretched into a warm smile that made him look severely aged rather than a walking blight.

“You’re so—” A shock of lightening darted through the thick clouds and cast Elutherius’ wasting broken face into light. Her eyes cast down on reflex.

Elutherius cleared his throat; his light golden robes swayed in the breeze. “I’ve looked better.”

The young woman gave him a soft smile. “I’m just glad you’re home.”

Elutherius glanced around at the outside of the Mandolorian Enclave, remembering the cold of the slave quarters at night with a strange fondness. It was a relief to have something so distant as an overworked cooling system stir something in him that awkardness of lumping the heir to a legacy with anything as trivial as a slave passed him by.

“The times I feel clear are fewer and further in between,” he said to a pane of grey. The rain knocked sharply on the full-length glass and the metal. It sounded a little like living in a tin can with thick insulation. The Mandolarian Enclave had been last week. Elutherius ran the memory through again over the fading whisper of the Force, but he found he couldn’t remember anything before Danara welcoming him home.

“Small price for ruling the world.” Was what she’d said next, but Elutherius couldn’t remember his response. Or even having existed past that point. It had something to do with him having been made Sith from the workings of a slave, no doubt. Or maybe it was having been made a slave from the workings of a Sith. To the Sith? He had been enslaved to the Sith, but that didn’t seem right.

What had she said again?

His head grew louder until the memory was eaten by both sides, and he felt himself expand into a sea of voices that connected the galaxy. He hummed to the tune they seemed to be pattering out and tried to cup his thoughts in his hands.

It was time to unlearn that.

He didn’t remember who he had been. Continued through numb routines. Friyr edged around the back of the Oro-bird coops until his feet smacked softly against wood. He and Sahley had sat there earlier. This anger wasn’t normal. This loss of memory wasn’t normal. This depersonalization wasn’t normal.

Sahley felt normal. He was down to earth, and sad. Quiet. He was interested. He sounded like Friyr’s age in timbre, and boy did his body certainly feel and respond to Friyr’s like it was thirty something. He was cricked, starting to develop aches….but pleasantly pliant. Falling out of youngness, but he was still so young.

He was an idealist. He believed in hope and thought Friyr was interesting because he was covered in scars, and talked openly about hardships like they were nothing. It attracted him, he listened. Friyr felt like a person when drawing the Mirialan in. Because Sahley let himself be controlled and wowed by someone who seemed as world-weary as he was.

“I realized too that was an attachment.”

If Friyr tried hard enough he could become red, down to earth, quiet, and sad while barking orders because someone else was somewhere in the Empire. For once he understood what he had felt like at fourteen. Perhaps thirteen. He remembered that balance. He remembered keeping people at a comfortable distance, while also serving in perhaps sensitive ways. He understood that he couldn’t stop people. He couldn’t break Force bonds. But he could handle his attachments, and he could let them float away on the wind.

Friyr was good at duty, he was good at serving. It had taken a long time to beat down the frantic angry Sith who forgot that.