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Bastila had the dream more than a hundred times, and it was always different. She looked at the world from a subtly different point in space and through the filters and enhancements of a mask. She strode, confidently and with a balanced weight, while Bastila always felt stiff and awkward outside of combat. When she spoke, people listened. She was brilliant, ruthless, decisive: she was Revan.
At first, still on the Endar Spire, Bastila had woken and taken meticulous notes each morning, then cross-checked them against the holonet, against the newly published histories of the Mandalorian Wars and against classified files she had access to in her capacity in the Fleet. Everything verifiable had come out. She had urgently messaged the Council to tell them what she knew, and at first they had been interested - until the dreams kept coming, and Bastila kept coming up with personal details about Revan and explanations of Revan's apparently inscrutable actions. Maybe Bastila had had the wrong tone explaining. Maybe it was just that the Council was rightfully concerned about a half-trained Padawan with so much access to a Sith Lord's memories. Soon, the Council had not asked her for information, but about her own mental state: Bastila, how is this affecting you? Do you need leave from the Fleet? Are you meditating often enough? And always, of course, how is the subject? Is she still blind to the Force?
Increasingly Bastila was ashamed of it, but the subject had meant little to her at first, except that if she was in no way Darth Revan, Bastila at least didn't have to be bound to a Sith Lord (and if she was in no way Darth Revan, she was no one special, really, no one Bastila would be particularly interested in). Bastila had never met Revan. She had been at the tail end of Revan's corrupted generation, only just old enough to be in the audience for what must have been the last trip to recruit Jedi for Revan. Yes, it was terrible to think of being cut from the Force, but Revan, captured, had been lucky only to escape execution by the Republic - or so Bastila had thought.
The more of Revan's memories she lived through, the more Revan felt known to Bastila, almost like an old friend she hadn't seen in some time. The more Bastila felt she knew Revan, the more terrible she felt it had been to cut Revan - anyone, but especially Revan - from the Force.
But that much was no longer an issue. On Taris, the subject had begun to feel the Force again, and to be known to it in turn: sparkling and alive with destiny as Revan must once have felt, so that Bastila had to fight to look away. On Dantooine the Masters had begun to (re-)train the subject. She learned so quickly. There were things she could do that Bastila still struggled with. It was just as well that there was little accurate written about the Jedi outside their Order, since it meant the subject would have trouble understanding her own progress. Bastila would have been murderously envious if she hadn't known perfectly well that Revan had been able to do all of these things before. So at least Bastila, when she woke from the dreams, no longer had to feel responsible for the loss of Revan's Force abilities. Her responsibility was only the loss of Revan's very identity.
Bastila wished she could have spoken to someone about that, but it had been obvious she couldn't keep reporting with total honesty to the Council. They didn't really want to know why Revan had fallen, and they certainly didn't want Bastila to witness and report, secondhand, the details of Revan's Sith teachings. They were always suspicious of young Jedi, since Revan and Malak had left, and all the more so since they had returned as Sith. Bastila, along with her whole generation - all that were left - had learned when to prevaricate.
But that left her alone with the dreams - alone with the ghost of Revan.
"Tisiphone," said Bastila to the subject, "Where do you think we should go, first?"
In theory, asking her advice directly would allow Bastila to control the outcome of the conversation and make her feel included. In practice, the crew - even Carth, even Bastila herself - followed her, not Bastila. Revan's gift for command hadn't been stripped from the subject with the Force, and she still dominated each conversation and every decision without effort. Bastila in contrast felt more and more like she was barely holding herself together for any conversation these days. It was all she could do not to burst out with a confession - what she had done herself and what the subject had done - every time she looked Carth or Juhani in the eye. But at least asking Tisiphone for advice gave Bastila some idea what the subject would tell the crew to do in advance.
"Good question." The subject always seemed at home in any place or situation. Just now she was seated in the hold with her feet up, finishing her caf, and Bastila traced the line of one muscled calf from the curve of Tisiphone's boot to her trousers before wrenching her eyes away. "I thought Manaan. It's a neutral world, so it shouldn't be too dangerous, and if we're lucky it turns out one of the other Star Maps is intact. We're only assuming the worst in planning to visit all four maps. Might as well save the worst for last, and maybe avoid it altogether."
"And by the worst, you mean Korriban," said Bastila. Tisiphone smiled at her, slow and amused, and Bastila felt like a fool for stating the obvious. "I agree," she said, pretending she was still in control of the situation. "Shall I - I'll go and inform Carth."
Every time she walked away from Tisiphone, Bastila felt her laughing in the Force. It wasn't malicious. The subject had been given a fictitious identity about the same age as Revan, some years older than Bastila, and the Force bond made Bastila excruciatingly aware that the subject thought Bastila was very cute.
Manaan was terrible. Specifically, it was terrible because Bastila had nothing to do. The subject went to a private meeting with the Republic embassy. When she came back, she announced that she was going down in a submersible to the Star Map, and Bastila had better stay here, she was taking Juhani and Canderous. Bastila's protests were immediately and sensibly overruled: there was something wrong with the base, apparently, and while Tisiphone was sure they could handle it, on the off chance that it turned out the base had flooded with poisonous gas or the submersible's engine was shot out or something else beyond their control, the Republic couldn't afford to lose Bastila. So while one of them had to go, it had better be Tisiphone, the subject finished, and patted Bastila's arm consolingly.
Bastila couldn't actually argue with this logic, but the thought of the subject kilometers under the ocean in what was probably the only available submersible, unreachable no matter what Bastila sensed or what happened, made her insane. The brief pressure of Tisiphone's fingers on her arm lingered like a haunting. She had a vision - not through the Force, just her own intellect - of the rest of the mission going more or less like this: Tisiphone sensibly explaining why Bastila had better stay safe on the ship, then going off to do exactly what she liked and Bastila omitting details in her reports to the Council to avoid admitting to this. Worse, she didn't know if she could avoid it. Trying to yank the subject's leash would only make it obvious she was on it, and Bastila was supposed to be concealing Tisiphone's status as a prisoner from her. (The alternative, that Bastila would try to yank the leash and realize it had been cut weeks ago and she had no control whatsoever, didn't bear contemplating.)
Bastila tried to distract herself with a walk, but slowly ambling around Ahto City without a purpose, feeling the eyes of the off duty Sith on her and wondering if they knew who she was, was worse than brooding. Finally she went back to the ship, sat down for just a moment on her bunk in exhaustion, and promptly fell into a deep and all-consuming sleep.
Nightmares tore at Bastila like they had been lying in wait. She half-woke several times and struggled for consciousness, but her brain had become an enemy and the dreams pulled her back down. She walked through a battlefield, untroubled by the blood that soaked the hem of her robes and trousers. She leaned into a set of tomb carvings portraying monstrous acts, and felt only raw, sizzling excitement. With a pen light she illuminated details, throwing the deep recesses into sharp shadow, and gesticulated with her off hand, turning to explain a point to a young, skeptical Malak. She took the mask off and pulled her hood down, thinking that the commanders would feel better seeing her face, and she really needed emotion for this. Then she walked into a meeting of the ragged remains of the Republic Fleet, sat at the head of the table, and began: "Gentlebeings, I'm here to propose treason."
When at last Bastila woke, the dorm was dark, and she was soaked from her socks to her scalp in sweat. She felt wrung out, like she had fought ten rounds, commanded a battle and finished up with one of Master Vrook's notorious oral examinations on philosophy. When she sat up in the dark, she was trembling faintly. She should have been rested. She had just slept - she fumbled for her chrono to check - a good ten hours.
The crew would be asleep. Bastila squinted crusty eyes and reached, with the demeanor of someone testing if a stove was hot, for the Force. No new visions came. Awake and in control of her own mind, the living Force swept into her with its usual purity of dominion. In the Force, nothing else mattered, and Bastila felt more collected as she checked the location of the crew - and then she felt rather stupid instead, as Juhani and Mission were both asleep in the same room and if she had been less disoriented she could have heard their breathing with her ears.
Revan - Tisiphone - the subject was also back, but awake, in the main hold. No one else seemed to be there. Bastila rose, regretting it, and dug clean clothing out of her luggage before she went to the fresher. Belatedly she touched the Force again and verified Canderous had also returned safely from the Star Map, but she hadn't really expected otherwise.
Scarcely half an hour later Bastila went, dressed but not much better prepared, into the main hold. Tisiphone was still awake, sitting over an undrunk mug of tea and staring into the middle distance. She looked, frankly, bad. She looked like Bastila felt, faintly haunted and deeply exhausted, and a part of Bastila was vindicated and relieved by it and then immediately guilty. But Tisiphone always seemed so in control that it was a surprise - a welcome surprise - that she was affected by any of this, too. Anyway the Force's destiny remained settled on her like a cloak and she still captured Bastila's gaze without trying, but that destiny lay as a martyr's halo instead of a sparkling, swirling euphoria.
"I would say good morning, but I suppose it's not," said Tisiphone.
"Not good?" said Bastila out of perverseness, and then castigated herself for being a petulant child.
But Tisiphone gave her slow smile and said, "Not morning. I'd meant to do this on a walk, you know, but Ahto City has a curfew. I suppose this is good enough, though, since everyone else is asleep."
"This?" said Bastila, blankly, and took the seat across from Tisiphone, who promptly pushed a second mug over to her, and said:
"I've been waiting for you."
"Did something happen on the base?" Bastila asked, wondering if she also had to feel guilty for sleeping all day, but she suppressed that thought. The subject could easily have come and woken her up once they got back. "I mean, what did happen on the base?"
Tisiphone shrugged. "Arrogance and rank stupidity. The Republic base was trying to get around treaty agreements as to how much kolto they could harvest, and seriously disturbed the environment," she elaborated, when Bastila raised her eyebrows. "As a result the firaxa sharks became lethally hostile, and they have - or the oldest of them has - a defense people have forgotten about, the ability to broadcast through the Force and spread that hostility to Selkath, so the Selkath staff on the base killed most of the others. I destroyed the machinery that had disturbed the sharks and ended the broadcast, but the Manaan authorities are going to have to deal with the traumatized survivors. Then the three of us were arrested until I explained the situation. But you were better off sleeping through it. All it really needed was one person to come down - without any Selkath in the submersible as it came into range - and cross the base, without being killed, to find out what happened."
Bastila's mouth dropped open at this story told without, apparently, much interest. She tried to focus: "Is this going to affect the war and the Republic treaty?"
"I don't think so," said Tisiphone. "It turned out half the court had been in on it, and the other half were already in the pay of the Sith anyway. Undoubtedly the same is true of the planetary authorities, so they're about as deadlocked as they were in the beginning." She drummed her fingers on the table and said, "I didn't know the firaxa sharks could do that, before, but I suppose it may be related to the Star Maps. We never could decide, before, if they were drawn to Force-strong locations or if they caused the Force to gather around them, or if some other aspect of the Rakatan technology like the terraforming did."
Alarm sirens rang distantly in Bastila's nightmare-fogged mind. Very slowly, like peering out from under the covers into an ominous night, she said, "Before?"
The subject raised her still-dark, untainted eyes to Bastila's, and this time her slow smile was terrible in its understanding.
That expression should have been malicious, but wasn't. "Malak and I, I mean," Revan said, and cupped her hands around her mug. "And the other Jedi who followed me, those who I trusted with the details of the Star Maps. We had a number of very heated arguments about the mechanics of the whole thing, those of us who cared to speculate. Sith intellectual debates can get very nasty. Not that it matters now. Malak isn't playing with all of his cards anymore, I am - what you've made me - and the others are mostly dead."
Bastila flinched. She knew perfectly well that she should be terrified right now, that she was alone with a Sith Lord - with the Sith Lord, who would have killed her if not for Malak's betrayal - and no one on the ship or in fact on Manaan was equipped to fight Revan. Possibly no one in the galaxy was equipped to fight Revan. Bastila was at Revan's mercy. Worse, if Revan spared her, Revan would be putting herself at Bastila's mercy, between the reports to the Council and Carth as pilot and the simple fact that Revan had to sleep sometimes, and so if malice or simple vengeance did not provide a compelling enough reason for Revan to kill or capture Bastila then simple self-preservation would. But all of that calculation was very distant and unnatural to Bastila and new, while she had been dwelling for months now on her culpability in the violation of Revan's soul, so guilt over that was familiar. Bastila had thought Tisiphone oblivious but apparently Revan had known all along, and the acknowledgment and indictment in the words what you've made me nearly undid her.
Revan reached across the table, with a graceful and empty hand, and touched Bastila's cheek. Bastila's mind went utterly blank.
"It's not so bad as all that," Revan said, softly. It was manipulative and it was working. Bastila so desperately wanted not to be to blame for all of this, whether the blame was for succeeding or for failing. "Hey, I know you feel awful about the whole thing. Have felt awful. It's been blaring in my head since I touched the Force again. If I was ignorant of my identity, I have no idea what I'd think. And you can't form a Force bond out of malice, you know. You saved me - you really did save me when Malak fired on us - and it wasn't because you were thinking of the war effort, because it never could have resulted in this. I have my doubts that you could have used the Force to heal while planning what the Council decided to do. I don't hold you accountable for it."
"You're a Sith Lord," said Bastila thickly, and found she could move again. She put her face in her hands on the table. "You expect me to believe," she said thickly, fighting back tears, "That you care about my compassion?"
"Bastila, I know I've done terrible things and I'll probably do more, but I do still care about the galaxy," Revan said quietly. "And about other people. If I didn't care I never would have come back from the Unknown Regions in the first place. I was never the hunger-for-hunger's-sake type of Sith Lord. Yes, the kind of compassion you feel is a little beyond me, now, but I developed ways of reminding myself of what I valued when I knew what I would become, and I have respect for it even if I can't match it."
"You, what? Tried to conquer the galaxy to save it?" said Bastila.
"I don't know how much of the linear narrative you've gotten from my mind," said Revan. "Probably not much. The dreaming brain doesn't work that way. But you've seen enough to know my intentions, haven't you?"
"What?" said Bastila. "You've been in - the other dreams?"
"Bastila, look at me," said Revan, and Bastila looked.
This was the moment of truth and therefore of horror: when Revan told Bastila to do something she simply and automatically obeyed without the intercession of thought. It wasn't a Force trick. It was just that Revan spoke softly and gently in a familiar voice, and she was broadcasting, if no emotion so gentle as her words, at least a sincerity and pureness of intention that made it hard to believe she was deceiving Bastila - though she must be planning to.
Bastila had balked at killing Revan the stranger as a defeated enemy, and had not been able to so much as leave Revan to die in favor of getting off a disintegrating ship. Bastila would absolutely not be able to strike down this Revan, her bond mate in the Force and companion of months, who Bastila had already helped the Council wrong, grievously.
"I sent you the dreams," said Revan, calmly. "I didn't think we would be able to talk without giving you a chance to see my perspective. I know you find them upsetting, and I apologize for that..."
"You're not actually sorry," said Bastila, who could sense as much.
Revan shrugged, and shifted in the chair. Bastila was distantly outraged that even now her eyes went briefly to the way Revan's flimsy tank top stretched over her breasts when she moved her shoulders. "As I said. Some of my feelings, I have to go about in a more intellectual way, now. It was never my intention to traumatize you with my memories." This was distressingly sincere as far as Bastila could tell. "I didn't realize how upsetting you would find them even after years of battle yourself - especially that the memory of the Dark in them would hurt you. I forget how that feels to a true Jedi, now. But even if you can't assemble a narrative out of my past, you remember being me, and you know I wasn't crazed with sadism or lust for power, don't you?"
Unfortunately, Bastila did. She closed her eyes and saw again that last vision: Revan in front of the Republic officers, persuading them to rebel, but behind the psychological mask of emotions she had to convey to them, feeling no lust and no glory in violence - no glory at all - but only a sort of weary determination and conviction. Behind it all there was peace, a desolate peace that it undid Bastila to perceive, much more than the Dark in the Force. Revan had been, and remained, at peace with all she had done. It was the peace of a battlefield where everyone left was dead.
"I have your conviction, much more than any of the actual reasons," Bastila admitted. "But I know now that you were... rational. It doesn't mean I agree with you."
"I don't expect you to see things my way immediately," said Revan, and Bastila was aghast at the last caveat, but she went on peaceably, "That's why I wanted to do this on Manaan. You know they can detect violence on board the ship and won't let it take off without investigating. If you killed me, always assuming you could, you'd only be arrested for it. Manaan won't accept 'Well, she was a Sith Lord.' You know that the Republic can't afford to see you executed on Manaan, not with Malak still out there."
"As though your return isn't more of a threat," snapped Bastila.
"Right now, I'm not doing anything to the Republic," said Revan, going on very reasonably. "Malak is on course to beat you all on his own, and you know he won't make any sort of terms that I might have, he just wants to smash the central government. He always did take orders too well," she said more to herself than Bastila, but rapidly continued, "If I did escape and go off to try to take over the Sith again, if anything it would help you. We would be immediately divided by infighting and probably fighting over the Star Forge - it's a shipyard fueled by the Dark Side of the Force, by the way, only a Sith or follower of a comparable tradition can use it - and then using what it produced against each other when it changed hands. I wondered if that was what the Council had intended, to be honest, when I first woke up. Threatening to release me might actually have forced Malak to make terms.
"But I forgot how dangerous that combination of idealism and no real principles can be. Do you know, they actually learned how to do this from me? It's an old Sith art, the removal of the identity and coaxing of the subconscious to replace it. I never used it, but I studied the theory for what it demonstrated about the mind. From what I recall, I was having one of those circular I-am-fascinated-by-this-knowledge-you-disgust-me-by-possessing arguments with Master Dorak when he pulled the method from me with the Force, although he only thought they might use it to help any victims of Sith brainwashing that were recaptured. I imagine the Council meeting where somebody proposed using it on me was a pretty nasty argument itself."
"They obviously didn't learn it very well," snapped Bastila, head spinning. Finally she remembered her tea and took a sip. A moment later she was afraid it was drugged, but then if Revan was capable of sending Bastila immersive nightmares she probably wouldn't need to drug her.
"Well, it's not the sort of thing you want to do for the first time on a Sith Lord," said Revan. "If they had been serious about this they should have tested it a few times on Force blind prisoners, but of course they weren't going to do that. Most of them knew me as a student, so they still think of me that way, not as anybody really comparable to their power. I visited Dantooine back then, you know - do you know? I don't think we ever met, but I could be wrong."
Bastila shook her head. She could see what Revan was doing by drawing her into conversation, attacking her convictions and then retreating disorientingly into gentle small talk. Knowing the process didn't stop it from working, necessarily. If Bastila had been a prisoner she could have used that knowledge of method to distance herself from Revan as captor, but everything Revan drew on now was true: the months of companionship and Bastila failing to distance herself from Tisiphone, the crime against Revan, and Bastila's resulting real and exponentially rising doubts about the Council's decisions over the course of the whole mess. Only the realization that Bastila had not actually stolen Revan's identity was balancing it. That gave her the terrible understanding now that if some other Sith had come to her and said, somehow, see what you've done to Revan, see how the Jedi Council itself uses Sith arts and tell me that I am the evil one and you are good, Bastila might have gone over.
"I met Malak, once," Bastila said. "I was with the students they tried to recruit, the last time, but I was a year or two too young to go, even if I had wanted to." Some of her older friends had gone. "Revan," said Bastila, remembering the last time she had addressed this woman so on her flagship and trying not to, "What do you want? Why are you revealing yourself to me?"
"It didn't seem likely that I would keep you convinced I was ignorant indefinitely, so revealing myself in a controlled situation was the best way to go," said Revan. "As I said, you can't kill me on Manaan, even on the ship, and Manaan might just be the only place in the galaxy where Darth Revan is fairly safe right now. Neither side wants to jeopardize the kolto, the Manaan authorities won't just shrug it off if I'm killed by another Sith, and the planetary government doesn't especially care about me. I was here before for the Map, but we spent less than forty-eight hours on the planet and I think the most eventful thing I did in Ahto City was get into an argument about Senate politics at a cantina."
Bastila blinked, and Revan said, impatient, "I want my life, Bastila, before anything else. Yes, I want to do things with it, but I have to have my life for any of them. I was - am - willing to give it up by fighting if it's for a purpose, but I don't want to be casually put down for breaking through brainwashing, or shut in a cell indefinitely instead."
Bastila flinched. Through it, she said, "So you're - what? Going to walk off the ship and get a room in a hotel under your real name?"
"Depending on how this conversation goes, maybe," said Revan, cracking a smile again, sparkling with humor in the Force. "It might be funny, if nothing else. Manaan actually has my bio records from when we visited, so I could even prove it here. But no, Bastila, I didn't lie when I told you I still cared about the galaxy, or that Malak followed my general orders a little too well without understanding my purpose. He's just smashing up the galaxy for the sake of smashing it, he's got to be stopped, and if I try to take over the Sith again to do it I'll only add a third side to this civil war. No. My intention is to complete the mission."
"What," said Bastila.
"Drink your tea and let me finish. I'll tell a few members of the crew, with your agreement - Canderous will just be pleased and T3 won't care, and I think Mission and Zalbaar will take it fine if I'm not threatening anyone innocent and can control how they're told. My suggestion is that you give Carth a limited version of the truth, that he was right to suspect something was going on and I'm a Dark Jedi prisoner who's cooperating in exchange for limited immunity, because I can help you find Malak. It would have been an easier sell before the Jedi training, but I suppose you can decide if you think he'll take admitting to brainwashing better than a suggestion that was a cover story and the Council was trying to decide if I could be trusted to use the Force again or something. Tell him, I don't know, I was Revan's assistant or guard or something and you captured me on her flagship, and I was willing to make a deal since Malak had betrayed my leader first. We'll have to tell Juhani something if the rest of the ship knows, and I don't feel I know her well enough to decide what to say, but I did talk her into coming back to the Council and she might believe I was redeemed, too. The same story you give Carth would be best, since she'll be the most reluctant to deceive him."
"Why did you redeem Juhani?" said Bastila, seizing on the only part of this that she could usefully respond to - or, well, stalling.
"What good was she doing anyone, sitting in the back of beyond on Dantooine driving kath hounds insane? --Incidentally, it's a version of what the firaxa sharks were doing, and come to think of it, that's good evidence the Star Maps might have caused both. Remind me to look into that." This didn't seem to be a serious order. "The Dark is a tool and a method, but if you just throw yourself into it and say, take away my pain, it will. It will also take away everything else. That's useful to a certain extent with a prisoner, who I can then put into a command structure, and wait for them to remember how to be a person again in their new environment, but that wasn't what happened to Juhani. I don't actually enjoy people suffering for no purpose, and Juhani was suffering. So, what will it be? We tell the crew half the truth and continue, or I walk away on Ahto City?"
There was only one answer Bastila could give. The question was what she would tell the Council, after. "Do you seriously expect me to accompany you to Korriban knowing this?"
"Korriban is full of Malak's loyalists," said Revan, almost dryly, "And the Academy itself is fairly pathetic, but if I broke character there the Sith would immediately all know, and take the side of the Sith Lord with the army to use to reward them, and I'd be hunted down wherever I went after. You're safer from me on Korriban than almost anywhere else. The places you should worry about taking me are Tatooine and Kashyyyk, where there's no real civil authority to care if I kill you all and steal the ship."
"That's comforting," said Bastila sarcastically. "Revan..." She put her head back in her hands. "I need to think," she said, finally.
"That's fine." Revan was too amiable, like she knew she had won. "We're safe enough on Manaan, and I think Carth went to talk to the base and they had some kind of business for him while he's here, so we'll have to wait a few days to leave anyway. Take your time."
The understanding was too much, and Bastila had already failed, failed the most important task she had ever been given, failed months ago by refusing to kill Revan in service of what she thought a Jedi should be, so she gave in one last way. Face in her hands on the table, she let herself cry.
Revan stood in a soft whisper of fabric, and Bastila thought she would leave. Instead she came around the table and put one hand on each of Bastila's shoulders, and leaned down to kiss the crown of Bastila's head over her hair. It was too much. Bastila could remember, when she was very young, how her father had kissed the top of her head the same way.
On the verge of a much more dangerous surrender, Bastila twisted in the chair. She felt Revan's muscles go still in preparation and had an instant to be comforted by it: Revan was bluffing at least some of her certainty about Bastila's responses. Bastila started to stand, and put a hand on Revan's shoulder to push her back. But before Bastila got to her feet, and through her tears, Revan kissed her on the mouth.
Bastila went stiff, and nearly shoved her off all the harder, but Revan opened her mouth and put her hand in Bastila's hair. Bastila was tired, trembling with exhaustion, and had been tired before this conversation began. She was in shock on some level, and Revan was so compelling - her body, her presence in the Force, her words. It was easy to give in, to open her mouth and kiss back and let Revan pull them together as though they had always meant to be this way, and Bastila, tonight, desperately needed something to be easy.
Revan drew them off to the cargo bay, where they would be harder to walk in on, as though she had planned it, which possibly she had: blankets were laid out, but Revan had slept out of the dorm sporadically all along. Bastila had no idea what she was doing, but in this area at least she didn't need to be ashamed of it. There was no particular requirement for a Jedi or an officer to be good in bed. Revan was as driven and forceful in sex as ever, and it could have been off-putting except that Bastila could feel a very real uncertainty - nearly insecurity - in her mind behind it, and except that the Force was singing around them.
Revan was her bond mate, who Bastila had tied to her very soul by saving, and Revan had spoken the truth by saying such a bond could not be formed in malice. It shone strongly between them, untainted by the Dark, nearly the only part of Revan's soul that was untainted. Bastila was in the bond and aware of it the way she had never before let herself be, not hiding anything from Revan and not repulsed by her, with Revan's fingers inside her and Revan's lips against her own, and that awareness gave her a new confidence. She knew that nothing evil could truly come from the living Force but now she believed it. She had saved Revan out of love - an abstract love, maybe, but a real one; perhaps Revan's abstract compassion was also real - and the Force had bound them together with that love, and it was not evil. She felt euphoric with relief and with the release of fear long withheld. She allowed herself to love Revan, not only what was left of Revan's humanity, with the sure knowledge that Revan was at least capable of reciprocating to have formed the bond in return.
They drifted off together in the cargo hold, Revan at least as exhausted as Bastila, which was also some comfort: she was mortal after all. Bastila had slept all day, and only dozed lightly. When she woke, Revan was truly asleep, face pillowed against Bastila's shoulder. Naked Bastila could see that her varicose veins hadn't all healed with the Dark's retreat, and that there was a little smear of engine grease at each wrist, in the gap between what she had reached washing her hands and where her sleeves consistently covered. Bastila felt fondness, exasperation, nerves again. Revan might have trouble identifying it, but her feelings for Bastila were real, and her manipulation of Bastila was, too.
Bastila couldn't really let Revan come with them without telling the crew the truth, any more than she could face the Council and admit she had failed. The fact that Revan had chosen Manaan for this confrontation and not Tatooine or Kashyyyk was some comfort, as it meant most solutions would not be immediately violent, but not enough to trust her unsupervised. Yet letting Revan leave alone was probably the right thing to do, removing the Council's temptation to try, again, to break their own souls on the rock that was Revan - if it didn't destroy the galaxy.
Bastila stroked Revan's hair back from her face, and shifted Revan's head to the pillow so she could move. The cold, hard cargo bay floor was uncomfortable against her hip, through the blankets. The crew would begin to wake, soon. Bastila would have to decide what to do, who to report to and what to say. She loved Revan, had probably loved Revan all along. There was a curious clean feeling to having faced the knowledge of it, despite the decisions ahead, and to knowing that Revan had not bent Bastila to her will by seducing her. Bastila was certain that if they parted here, they would meet again. The tie between them would hold strong. She was nervous, but she was no longer afraid.
Bastila sat up, and bent over to kiss Revan. She couldn't resist whispering to her, "I love you," secure that Revan was fast asleep and wouldn't hear. The day would arrive, and Bastila would face it, and the only choice she could make. But not yet. She could stay here, Revan peaceful in her sleep and half in Bastila's lap, for a little while yet.