Chapter Text
Clinging gray fog lies thick over Brendok, whispering in Mae’s ears, tugging at her heels, seeping below her clothes to chill her skin. Shapes loom distantly out of the mist, twinkles of illusory starlight collapsing in on themselves as dusk deepens over the land. But even as those little twinkles of light gutter into nothing, other lights, glaring and garish, ignite further away, driving little needles of pain behind Mae’s eyes, unused as they are to artificial light.
Yes, artificial light. Mae stares at those lights, which shine red and yellow and blue before blending together into an ugly, searing cacophony like toxic oil in a sunlit puddle, trying to place them and failing. There shouldn’t be… No, that’s not right. There’s no one here but her. There are no towns. There are no villages. There are no cities, no hamlets, no boroughs, no communes, no people here besides her and her kin. If someone else has come here and decided to start building, surely she would have seen something, surely she would have noticed, surely she could have—
—left.
It’s wrong. It shouldn’t be here. It’s wrong. She’s not seeing what she thinks she’s seeing; that happens often enough, especially these days. She shouldn’t—
Shouldn’t go near it, and yet, Mae’s feet carry her closer and closer towards the source of the lights, faster and faster until she’s running, branches whipping in front of her, clawing at her face like hands determined to drag her back, but without the strength necessary to hold her. High overhead, trees with dense, sweeping limbs box out the night sky, but those artificial lights have erupted to compete with the stars, the ground beneath her feet turning from untended turf to a hard-packed, dusty street that allows her to reach greater speeds without having to worry about putting her foot into an ankle-turning hole in the ground. On either side of the street are… no, not boulders, not as she had thought, but buildings to suit this town that has sprung impossibly out of the mist. Flakes of peeling paint pool on the street, lights embedded in the stone flare into life, birthing a false day within the cradle of the night.
Brendok’s past resurrected? Everyone was someone else before, and the same is true of planets, isn’t it? Brendok is rich and green. Brendok was once dead and barren. And before it was dead and barren, there once again was life. Death and life, life and death, they sit so close together that she thinks sometimes that something in its second life can sometimes just… just forget that this is the second life, and not the first. People are like that, too.
Aren’t they?
Osha?
She’s being a fool.
Osha?
When was the last time she went to sit under the bunta tree and wait for her sister, and find anything but disappointment? A new flood of tears to pool at her feet?
Osha?
She is a fool. She can’t shake the idea that in this place where the past is no longer past, she, too, could find someone out of her past, someone who should be long vanished.
Mae’s run slows to a walk as she wanders the uneven, winding streets, searching for any sign of life. The streets are empty, without even footprints in the dust to show where people once were. Lights shine upon the street, but there are no lights in the windows, no smells but the green smell of the trees looming overhead, no sounds but the wind tracing its moaning path across the hills. With a slow inevitability like a planet being dragged into the path of a black hole, hope begins to gutter into darkness in her chest. She is as alone here as she has ever been on Brendok, ever since—
In a dark doorway, a shadow moves.
Mae’s mouth moves and her heart sings before her mind can really catch up. “Osha!” she cries out, all of the night’s chill forgotten, all of the grief of these terrible years forgotten. How many times did she sit under the golden boughs of the bunta tree and pray for an end to the terrible silence of the forest which surrounded her? How many times did she pray for arms to hold her as she wept? How many times was it that she prayed that she not be asked to face this hateful, thankless galaxy alone?
And at last, all her prayers are answered. She takes a step towards that shadow in the doorway, then another, then another—
…And then, and then, and then, the cold whispers to her, and laughs lightly, and mocks her for all her hopes, and the darkness of the doorway is cleaved in two, partitioned by livid vermillion light.
It is her sister. The shape of that body is the same as hers, and no matter what else may proclaim itself truth in this hateful galaxy, Mae would know Osha anywhere. It is her sister, and she is met with no darkling twinkle of the eye, no soft, smiling lips, no features so similar to her own. The head is—
Harsh, blistering pressure wraps itself around Mae’s throat like the squeeze of an unforgiving hand; she can barely swallow around it, and each breath that forces its way up out of her mouth burns her lips like fire.
The head is—
—Missing?
No, no, not missing, not like she thought at first. Osha takes a step forward. That vermillion light flares up, dancing with grinning malice upon a grinning mask.
Not missing. Just obscured.
“Even now?” Osha asks her, a garbled hiss that grates on Mae’s ears like sandpaper. She holds the blade aloft, light lapping bloodily at their feet. “Even now, you want to drag me back to your side?”
No, no, no, not like this, Mae holds her hands up in front of her, shield and placation and protest all at once. “I just wanted to find you!” she insists. Voice cracking, “I never wanted to live my life alone. Did you? I just wanted to find you, Osha!”
“Liar.” What could have been a soft little whisper reverberates in the chill air, a slow, hard drag of steel against stone against flesh immured somewhere beneath. “You’ll do anything to drag me down with you, won’t you? Even when I’ve finally found where I was meant to be, you’d still try to drive me off the path just so you don’t have to be alone.”
“That isn’t what I…”
Her mouth is nothing but a place where self-serving words go to die. They fizzle away to nothing upon the juddering red blade that lifts higher, higher, higher in the air before her, humming in fearsome joy as it seeks a home in her flesh—
-
Sleep broke within her mind, shattered like an egg dropped carelessly upon the ground, bits of eggshell quivering on the grass while the yolk glistened on the green stalks. Sleep shattered upon the hand that had intruded to shake her shoulder until she was jostled awake. Maybe some of that yolk… Ugh, how long had it been since she’d last eaten that she was going to food metaphors already? Mae felt as though her eyes were nearly glued shut by the sleep that was peeling away from her in bits and sticky pieces. When it had found her, sleep had grabbed her by the throat, and it was not eager now to let go, to let her surface fully into wakefulness.
Distantly, warbling, as though it reached her through a layer of water, she could hear someone’s voice, the mate to that jostling hand. She had to fight to focus on it, her mind as fuzzy and scattered as if she had been stunned or drugged.
Or maybe she was still sleeping.
Because when she did finally peel her eyes open, she opened her eyes to see bobbing over her a face that had appeared to her in nightmares so often that it was by now as familiar to her as Osha’s had ever been.
Not sleeping. Every last grain of muscle within Mae’s body kicked suddenly into overdrive as she, now unpleasantly awake, scrambled into a sitting position. Heart hammering in her throat, she went for one of her knives—how had she let him get so close to her, even asleep he was such a danger that she should have felt something tremoring in the Thread long before he had gotten so close that he could simply loom over her like this—only to come up with… with a utility knife?
Mae stared at the utility knife in frank confusion, trying to remember when it was that she had concealed one of these up her sleeve, and in place of one of the actual knives, too. Why had she done that? These things were all but useless as weapons, unless you were fighting something made of paper or flimsi. Why would she have one of these things instead of an actual knife, unless her actual knives were…
He took them off of me after he stunned me. Remember?
Meanwhile, Sol, who had been crouched over her where she slept, sprang back up to his feet, holding his hands out in front of him, perhaps to ward off an attack, or perhaps in simple placation. “It’s okay, Mae.” Placation: It took her entirely too long to recognize it, though perhaps she could be excused, for it was as strange a thing to hear from his mouth as it would be to see raindrops shooting up from the ground towards the sky, but he had taken on a tone which she thought was meant to be soothing. “It’s okay…”
She didn’t have time for his placations. Mae swung her legs out, going to stand up from the… bench? The bench she had been sleeping on, but her legs were far less limber than they should have been, even considering she had just woken from sleep, wobbling slightly as she braced her free hand against the side of the bench to hold herself upright. But as she did this, something else happened that served only to confuse her. Mae watched in complete bafflement as a heavy blanket slid off of her body and cascaded to the ground at her feet. She stared at it, blinking rapidly, trying to place where she was, and how she had gotten here.
A gloved hand hovered a few inches from her shoulder, visible out of the corner of her eye. Mae sucked in a long, deep breath, and let it blow the cobwebs away from her mind. Let herself wake a little more, and remember.
It was coming back to her now, memory wearily trudging along until it caught up with the present. Waking up handcuffed to the medstation bed. Escape, pursuit, and the crash all spun with sickening speed, just as the escape ship had spun and spun and spun until Brendok’s gravity claimed it and her hungrily for its own. Taking up refuge within the dubious shelter of the fortress, her old home that desired no longer to shelter the one who had burned it.
Clarity, painful as it was, taken up though it bruised and burned and pierced her—though at least she was not the only one subjected to that gauntlet, flimsy though the comfort of it was, brittle and nearly see-through, as fragile as a flutterby’s wing.
Sol’s confession, the one he had made to her, the one he had made to Osha.
And then Osha had killed him.
And Mae had undone her work.
Mae scrubbed at her face, stowing the utility knife back up her sleeve. There was a part of her ablaze with curiosity, which longed to ask Sol whether he really had thrown her knives out the airlock while she was unconscious the first time, as she suspected he had done. But she bit the question back. The question of whether she was going to be able to get her knives back would cease to matter very soon.
A great many things, she was afraid, would cease to matter very soon.
No longer able to dwell on anything that would have provided her with an excuse not to focus on the man standing in front of her, Mae turned her attention to Sol, who still regarded her as though he thought more placations to be necessary.
Cut off the placations before they could be spoken and irritate her skin. “What’s going on?” Mae asked—or tried to. In reality, she barely got the words out, her voice reduced to a thin little croak barely audible to her own ears. She cleared her throat hard, swallowing down what felt like approximately a gallon of congealed saliva. How long had she been asleep? She couldn’t even remember going to sleep.
Slowly, Sol lowered his hands, though the way he was looking at her made Mae think that they would soon come up again and come in too close if she didn’t stand very straight and very still. “We will be dropping out of hyperspace soon,” he told her, eyeing her shoulders so closely that, indeed, Mae was quite certain of what those hands of his would be doing if she started to sway, and wasn’t at all certain of what to do with that.
Mae blinked rapidly, trying to make that make sense. “…Coruscant?” and at least this time, she managed not to sound like a hundred-year-old woman who’d been smoking cheap cigarras for at least half that time.
Coruscant should have been days away; it had been days away the last time she was awake. Her stomach fluttered unpleasantly at the thought that they could be coming up on it even now. More time would have been nice, time to prepare herself for what was likely waiting for her on Coruscant. And she’d just… she’d just slept through the trip there? The whole way?
Here, Sol looked at her strangely, the weak light in the ship’s common area carving deep shadows in his face, leaving him haggard and more corpse-like than he had been when he had actually lied dead on the floor at her feet. But her work, the knot she had tied, still held firm; Mae could sense it the moment she stretched out her awareness even slightly. He was quite firmly alive, even if he appeared to her in this moment as a walking corpse.
(The thought clung to her mind, and would do for some time to come, afterwards. She shared this ship with a dead man who walked and talked and stared off at nothing as though he was considering every moment of his life, picking it all apart as he considered when he would be made to pick it apart in considerably greater detail. But just as much as she could sense the death in him, she could sense as well the life. Strange to find both coexisting within the body of a man. But nothing about this was normal.)
“No,” and there was in his mouth a strange, gentle strain that unspooled unevenly in the air between them. Something that seemed to want to offer itself to Mae for her to take up in her hands, but it… she couldn’t convince herself that it wouldn’t simply grow teeth and bite her if she drew too close to it. That seemed more likely than it—or him—being as harmless as it—or he—tried to present itself to her.
And while Mae was considering this, Sol was still speaking. “We need to stop for fuel. Do you remember?”
“…Yes.” Mae nodded choppily, frowning to herself. “Yes, I do.”
She should never have forgotten it. Even if she was fuzzy-brained from what was likely far too long sleeping, that was no excuse. Brendok was such a long way away from everything; it was stupid to think that they could get from Brendok to Coruscant in the Galactic Core so quickly that she could have just slept through the whole trip.
Willing herself to all the sharpness of full wakefulness, “How long do we have until we drop out of hyperspace?”
“Twenty minutes.”
And with that, Sol left her to her own devices once more, abstraction visibly robbing him of any of the resolve required to withstand company as he made his way back towards the cockpit with almost unseemly haste.
That was fine. Mae didn’t especially want his company right now, either.
With him gone, she was… Mae’s hand strayed to the pouch on her belt, finding Pip just where she had left him, even if he had gone completely silent for now. She was not completely alone, but she was freed from company of the kind that she’d do better not to bare her neck to, and now, she did sag a little as she let out a breath, reaching behind herself to set her hand against the bench she’d been sleeping on, bracing against it so that she did not have to rely entirely on her own control to keep her balance, to keep her stillness.
A rattling breath escaped her mouth, the effort to sweep the last of the cobwebs out of her mind underway, easier now that she wasn’t trying to do it under Sol’s scrutiny. And with no one around to reassure that she could stand unaided, Mae decided that the best thing to do was just sit back down. Best decision she had made that day, really (she could almost have smiled at how quickly she had decided that she would make no better decisions that day, but smiling was presently a little beyond her), for she could breathe easier immediately upon having something solid under her to hold her up, and her legs did not want to wobble nearly so much when they weren’t trying to hold the rest of her up. And thinking, too, was easier, when she was not concerned with the business of safeguarding herself against falls.
Had you told her just a few days ago that this was the turn her life would take, she would never have believed it. Or perhaps she would have believed it, were you convincing enough, but the only temper in which she could have believed it would have been dread. What you would never have been able to make her believe was that she would willingly get on a ship to Coruscant with Sol. A few days ago, Mae doubted she would ever have believed that she would have been in this situation without binders and a stun blast being involved.
It's not as though those didn’t get involved, she reminded herself. And now, she went to that place where other girls had once went—and not returned from. Again, her hand went to the pouch where Pip was resting, comforted by the weight and the presence.
And she seemed to have alerted him to… to something, because for all that she did not look down at Pip, staring at the far wall instead, she felt his head move, heard the warbling chirps parsed to “Do you think he’s going to hurt us if we stay near him?”
Mae wondered if Pip would have developed such an anxious personality if she had made more of an effort to win him over before instead of resetting him to ensure he wouldn’t blow her cover. Well, his anxious personality was in all likelihood her responsibility, so it wasn’t as though she had any room to lose patience with it. Hopefully, she would remember that if there ever came a time when she did feel as though she was losing patience with it; hopefully, she would not ruin another relationship by forgetting all that was her own—
“I don’t think so,” Mae assured him. Something in the tilt of that little head seemed skeptical to her, dragging a reluctant almost-smile out of her mouth. “He’d just put you in a drawer somewhere, probably. You’d be fine so long as you went into sleep mode or a timed shutdown.”
“What about you?”
Startling, that. Mae opened her mouth, and shut it again without ever speaking. She blinked, trying to make her mouth move enough to actually speak. She couldn’t remember when someone had been so—
“I…” She couldn’t figure out where her confidence was supposed to be. It wouldn’t come when she called for it. It wouldn’t let her voice be anything more than a soft, almost timid little whisper. “I think it’s okay.”
She… she did think it was okay. Maybe. If there was any danger now, she didn’t think it came from Sol—at least not in the form of him restraining her or chasing her again.
But Mae thought she knew where her confidence had gone, after all, because her thoughts soon drifted to another point. Had she really gone back to sleep after she had already been unconscious for hours just a short while before? Truly, she had been exhausted after doing what was needful to drag Sol back down the starless roads of death, reuniting spirit with flesh in the living plane. She had gone further and deeper into the Thread than she ever had, the weight overtop of her so great that she was half-surprised that it had not crushed her flat while she searched for the filament that wanted mending. It was the kind of exhaustion that could drive great, gaping holes into her judgment, leave her doing things she would never have done had her mind been clear and her body fully ready to follow its commands.
So exhausted that… so exhausted that she would fall asleep here, out in the open? Somewhere so exposed, somewhere so indefensible? Mae scanned her surroundings, every nook and cranny in the common area—medstation bed, the bunks set into the wall, the wall of various tools, what she supposed to be a communications array. There were so many places someone could hide and wait in ambush while she slept on a bench, of all places. Even one of the bunks would have been better—exposed as they were, at least there was one solid wall no one could sneak up on her from. But… but the bench?
Her eyes slowly drifted downwards, to the thick, heavy blanket that lied pooled at her feet. Her mind was pierced by a wicked little needle of unease, burrowing its way deeper and deeper down with every moment in which she considered how deeply she would have had to be sleeping not to feel it when that blanket dropped over her body. And at the same time, something else made itself known to her, threaded cunningly into that needle, but which worked to shave off all of the sharp edges of her unease and replace it with something a little hungrier.
Mae had known hunger in her time. She had known a great many different hungers. This one, she banished with a frustrated frown, pushing it down where it went unseen, hopefully to shrivel and die in the dark. Not every hunger was something to be pursued, and some hungers were just… were just kneejerk responses.
Clicking her tongue, Mae seized the blanket up off of the ground and balled it up, before identifying the bunk it had come from and tossing it back onto the mattress. She spotted a small pillow on the bench where she knew it had not been when last she was awake, and after hesitating, tossed it on top of the blanket. She would not be needing either of them now. Besides, she had work to do. Didn’t she?
Yes, she had work to do, considering she doubted this ship had stopped having its already-existent problems in the amount of time she had been sleeping.
Mae took Pip from the pouch on her belt, holding up so that he could look him in the—photoreceptors, she guessed, not eyes, and offered him a rueful twist of her mouth. “Come on, Pip. Looks like we need to work on the ship again.”
-
Twelve hours. It had been twelve hours of radio silence from Coruscant. Not a single word to break the silence. He had transmitted his confession, and then received no reply. Sol had checked on the transmission, and confirmed once, twice, three times that the recording had been successfully transmitted, that it had been successfully received at the destination. It had been. There was no issue. There was no problem with the communications array.
He had checked as well on incoming transmissions, several times. There was nothing. He’d not missed anything while he was away from the cockpit. There was just… just nothing. Where he had expected a furor, silence resounded instead, as though the Coruscant Temple had fallen off the face of the galaxy and he had transmitted his confession to nothing and no one.
It should have been a relief. The silence should have been something for Sol to savor, for as long as it lasted. He sincerely doubted that this silence (it was not peace; it wore the clothes of peace, but its face was pallid and mocking and not remotely peaceful) would persist once he had actually returned to Coruscant, and he should… he should appreciate it while he still could. Breathe it in, and cherish it as the last few quiet days he would have for… he was not sure how long.
It should have been a relief. He reached for relief, and could not find it. With every hour that passed him by in silence, the silence seemed more and more to him like a serpent coiling tighter and tighter, readying itself for the strike. He knew that the recipients of his transmission could not possibly have failed to have a strong reaction to it. How could they not respond strongly to it? What he had said ran entirely contrary to what he and Indara had presented sixteen years ago. He had expected to be bombarded by messages, demands that he explain himself, demands that he tell them where he was and why he was so far off-course from where he should have been, if he was returning to Coruscant from Khofar as he ought to have been. But—silence. Just silence.
He should have cherished this silence, and he couldn’t. The days it would take for them to reach Coruscant were to be the last days of his life in which he could even hope to pretend, and to a vanishingly small audience—the woman he shared this ship with most certainly did not qualify—that all was well, and that he was nothing more or less than what he appeared to be from the outside. The days it would take for them to reach Coruscant would be the last days of his life in which he did not have to look into the faces of nearly everyone he had ever known, and see reflected in every last one of those faces precisely the scorn that had been waiting for him. He was to be spared that for a little while longer. He was to be given more time to prepare himself for it, and yet, he could not cherish it.
All he could do was sit in this silence, and find nothing inside of him which served as a defense from the thoughts that dragged his mind in ever-accelerating, ever-expanding circles. Osha and her mother. Osha and Mae. There was no escape from these circular tracks; whenever he thought that he had found a way out, he discovered that what he had done was nothing more than simply jumping from one track to another, his thoughts running in circles and circles and circles. He went from Brendok and those whom he had once found there, and found himself standing in spirit on Khofar instead. For a while, anyways.
Jecki and Yord. Khofar and Brendok. Indara and Torbin and Kelnacca.
Osha, Osha, Osha, Osha…
The latest track was digging deep grooves in his mind—just as the Force had once wrapped tight around his throat, just as once had dug deep into his mind the image of the look in Osha’s eyes as darkness began to crowd in at the edges of his sight. But at last, there came something that could distract him from it. Maybe… Maybe not take him off of the tracks entirely, but at least provide him with something that could distract him from it, if only for a little while.
Not all of it had ended in death, he tried to tell himself, as he listened to the faint, hollow noise of Mae climbing up the ladder to get into the cockpit. Not every endeavor he had ever set out upon had ended in death. Not all of them.
“Everything looks fine,” Mae said simply as she sat down in the co-pilot’s chair, her eyes riveted upon the viewport and the blue-white swirl of hyperspace.
But the distraction was a distraction in more ways than one. It had distracted him while his mind found a new set of tracks to circle upon. He turned his gaze away from Mae, but with difficulty, and fixed it upon the same place which she chose to be so transfixed by.
He threw up a few moments’ resistance against the latest round of thoughts and internal questions to arise within him. They were… they scalded his mind like boiling water. To touch them directly would burn. Consume. Burn and consume, and what was left over after it had devoured what it would was—
She was still sitting right next to him.
“Was there anything which required attention?” he asked, just to confirm, just to hear her voice again, ringing in the silence, something he could convince himself was not a dream or a phantasm.
Out of the corner of his eye, there was a flicker of movement, a faint roll of her shoulders, not quite what he’d call a shrug. “Best as I could tell, no.” With a small bite to her voice, “Everything looks fine.”
Even you.
Which surprised him.
He’d not thought so when he had come back into the common room some twelve hours earlier, and found Mae curled up on her side on the bench where he had left her, fast asleep. It had only been a few minutes that he had been away—he had left feeling suddenly as though even a single pair of eyes upon him was too much, was like a scouring brand upon his mind, and then he had spent those few minute alone, and that certainty that he needed to be alone had morphed to a thrumming dread of the silence that resounded around him, every breath he took feeling tighter and tighter and shallower and shallower, as though the silence had become a noose as the Force had once so recently been a noose, and he had once again wanted company, only to find that his only possible company was not really company at all.
It had only been a few minutes, and yet she had been locked so deeply in sleep that he could well have been gone for an hour.
His eyes drifted more fully to Mae now, scanning her up and down, lingering on the line of her shoulders and back as she leaned forward slightly in her chair, giving her face a look, searching out exhaustion, searching out… he knew not what. He scarcely knew what he should be looking for.
When he had found her curled up on her side on that bench, he had not looked to her expecting to find sleep stamped over her features. That had not been what he supposed at all. He had seen her lying so still, so quiet, and heart in his throat, he was on his knees before her with his hand halfway to her neck before he finally spied out the faint rise and fall of her chest.
And it had been at that point that he had finally done what he should have done when he came back into the common area and found her like that, stopped playing the part of the panicky child and reached into the Force, relying upon it to give him an at least preliminary answer. He reached into the Force, and found nothing amiss. She truly was only asleep, a very deep, but natural, sleep.
Perhaps it had been the unflattering light which shone down upon her, but she had seemed to him every bit as careworn and drawn as she had looked when he woke up on the cockpit floor and found her lying next to him. As if her exhaustion had no end, and would simply claw away at her until there was nothing left to strip from her bones. Thus it was that Sol put aside any thoughts of how long she had been unconscious already, set a pillow under her head, yanked a blanket off of one of the bunks and laid it overtop of her, watched with furrowed brow as she never even stirred, and resolved to let her be.
Hadn’t he thought that she still needed to rest? The silence grew claws and teeth and sought him with cold malice, and he—he let her be. He had no choice.
And so Mae slept.
And slept.
The hours ticked by, and she slept. The normal span of hours for an adult human to sleep without waking came and went, and Mae showed no signs of waking, never even twitched or turned in her sleep. Sol would try to go somewhere else, do something else, but somehow, he always found himself back in the common area, standing over the bench, watching for any sign that she might be close to waking, and every time, denied.
Was it normal for her to sleep so long, so deeply? Was it normal for her to be so still in sleep? Sol did not need to reach into memory to search for an answer that he knew was not there. The only other time he had seen her in a state anything like this one was after he had stunned her, and that was… that was different. This was natural sleep, so—was this normal?
Normal for someone who had seriously over-exerted themselves in wielding the Force. Sol could not think of a greater over-exertion possible than to do what she had—
I should not be here.
—done.
The hours passed. The Force yet revealed nothing more than natural sleep. As those hours passed, it seemed to him that, by inches, the lines of careworn exhaustion unknitted themselves from Mae’s face. Her brow was no longer etched with deep furrows. Her skin no longer looked so dull. The fresh bloom of youth shone again in her cheeks.
There was a moment when he wondered if she dreamed. What she might dream about. Did she dream of her mother, of once again finding solace in her mother’s arms? Did she dream of Osha, and the reunion she had once longed for? Did she dream of solace cut short? Reunion cut short? Did she dream of the life she had once thought she would have, going down in flames?
Did she even dream of him?
But he could never ask her such a thing. He could never intrude upon the sanctity of her dreams.
Now, Mae sat next to him, and that exhaustion was so totally gone that it was as though it had never been. As though none of it had happened at all.
But Sol knew the truth. There was nothing he could do and nowhere he could go that would ever permit him to avoid that truth. That truth was rooted deep inside of him, in that hollow spot ever perceptible at the far corner of his waking mind, cold and blank and empty, the space where he had been dead. It did not whisper to him. It was far too void for that.
And so too was void the place where knowledge should have lived. He had no idea how she had done it. How she had called him back. Her explanation was… it was, to him, no explanation at all.
Abruptly, the ship dropped out of hyperspace. Sol had known when it would happen, and yet, this still managed to jar him; he blinked several times at the vista that showed itself through the viewport before he could really focus on it.
A relatively small star system. There was one inhabitable planet, and two gas giants further flung from their sun’s orbit, just as the file regarding this system had primed him to expect. Even at such a distance as this, such that it would take half an hour at the best speed permitted in the system to reach the inhabitable planet, he could sense the life teeming on the one inhabitable planet, gleaming in his mind’s eye like a vessel full of warm, pulsing light.
He could take no comfort in it. He could take no comfort in the light pouring from the star at the center of the system, could take no comfort in the Force that suffused his hearing. He could take no comfort in anything.
His gaze was drawn to Mae as though she was the star, and he the body helpless to do anything but orbit around her.
You should not have done it.
He had spoken those words to her just a little over twelve hours ago. He did not speak them now, but they crackled in his throat, scratching against the roof of his mouth. He found totally unaltered the mingled outrage and despair that had gripped him then.
You should not have done it!
I was ready. Don’t you understand, I was ready! I was ready for this to be over, I was ready to lay down everything and be nothing.
He was ready to be nothing.
But not today. It was not to be his today.
It gave him no joy.
There was no place within him where joy could live. Not at the idea of taking another breath, of feeling the sun and wind on his face. Not at the thought that he would live to see Coruscant again, live to endure everything that was to follow from that. After sixteen years, he had been ready, he had been so ready to—
Not today. It was not to be his today.
And he still didn’t understand why she had done it.
‘Wanted to,’ she had said.
‘Wanted to,’ he yet found deeply inadequate as an answer.
And then, the fact that she had refused to flee, even when he offered her the opportunity to do so…
This, he did not understand. He did not understand it any more than he knew her. She was to him a glass fogged with mist. What lied beyond it was a mystery he had yet to uncover. Would most likely never uncover.
The opportunity Mae had earlier turned down was coming up now. If past patterns held, they would be planetside for at least a couple of hours while refueling the ship, and she…
He wasn’t sure about this place. It wasn’t one of the standard refueling stops Jedi used when returning from missions. It just happened to be a planet on the way to Coruscant, a planet that didn’t run up any flags that made him think that it might not be a safe place to stop. A small, quiet planet, where he was unlikely to run into anyone whom he knew, who knew what he had done. Another spot of reprieve, a buffer between him and what was waiting for him at home. That was all it was to him. All it could be to him.
He wasn’t sure about spaceports, personally doubted that a planet of this size and this placement could have much in the way of spaceports. But to find the people spacefaring suggested that there were ships that could be boarded to get off-world. Would she still hold to the idea of going to Coruscant with him when she was presented with the opportunity she had lacked earlier to flee? To disappear into the margins of the galaxy? To slip through his fingers for all time, to vanish from his sight and leave him with nothing but the absence of her, glass glistening with mist that would turn to frost never-melting?
The answer lied somewhere beneath that face of hers, her eyes sharpening as they drank in the sight of the planet now firmly on their approach. Somewhere within the opaque mind which he dared not grasp again, for fear of shattering this fragile peace which reached out between him and her. It was not a bridge, but for a moment, he could entertain the fantasy that it could be, some day.
Just a fantasy. Nevertheless, not a fantasy he wished to shatter, and thus, her mind and her thoughts were untouchable.
But what is to become of you if you stay?
As much a mystery to him as she was. Now that they would be walking into the Temple with his confession already disseminated, he could no longer be certain of how she would be treated. He had precious little idea of what was going to happen now, and the uncertainty of it left him feeling like the ground he was standing on was a thin layer of soil only that hung over an endless, lightless abyss. He didn’t know if he desired more to continue threading the narrow path that would see him safely across, or if he wanted to pitch himself sideways and go tumbling headlong into nothing.