Where She Could Not Follow

Carth pressed the comm pad to the small, nondescript housing unit in the residential pod on Citadel station. A feminine voice answered. "Identify yourself, please."

"Onasi," he clipped out. "I've just come from an important meeting. I'm sure you'll be interested."

The door slid open halfway and he edged through. "I can get that fixed if you like," he said, holding out his hands.

Bastila Shan placed her hands in his and leaned forward to touch her cheek to his in a brief greeting between old friends. "Hello, Carth," she said. Her hands were cold, and too thin, he thought. Life in hiding had not been kind to her.

The living room was lit with weak lamps and he resisted the urge to order the lights up by fifty percent. "How are you doing?" he asked, his eyes searching her face as best as he could in the gloom.

She looked away from him. "I live in pampered comfort," she said bitterly, "while the others are hunted down one by one, trapped like animals. How do you think I fare?"

He squeezed her fingers. She jerked her hands away. "Bastila," he said. Trust her to consider the small utilitarian quarters 'pampered comfort.' Jedi asceticism as ingrained as her manners. "This is how it has to be. Let's not have the same old argument. I've just come from a very interesting visit with someone. An Exile. One of R--the--his old generals we believed long dead. This Exile destroyed the Ravager."

She nodded. "I felt that--destruction through the Force." She looked away, then looked back at him, her blue eyes too big in her face. "I was glad of it." Her words ended in a hiss.

She'd lost more weight, he realized. I don't care how much money or how much force it takes, he thought. I'm getting someone in here if I have to snap a neural collar on her and force-feed her myself through a tube. "The Exile is going to destroy Malachor V," he said. "The last remnant of his legacy."

Her eyes narrowed. "What good will that do? The Jedi are all but gone. Even the Sith are a pale shadow of what they once were. The Force is dying, Carth," she said, crowding him back towards the door with her body. "And I don't care. I don't bloody care."

Just before he edged out the half-opened door, he debated the wisdom of telling him about the others accompanying the Exile. The Force-sensitives. Misfits, every one, and a slim sliver of hope, but sometimes a sliver was all it took.

But no. She wasn't ready. "There's hope, Bastila," he said. "There's always hope."

The light from the hallway slashed across her face, highlighting her cheekbones in stark lines. Her hair was longer now. No longer done up in the ridiculously ornate series of ponytails and braids. She pulled it back in a simple, tight ponytail from which strands escaped to hang down around her face. She was still lovely, still could pass for the youthful innocent that had once huffily insisted that she had been the one to rescue Daum Valtis from a swoop gang rather than the other way around. Until you looked at the shadows in her eyes, and the tight lines around her full lips. "Hope," she said, "is all I live on, and it is a cruel thing indeed."

"Be well, Bastila," he said. "May the Force be with you."

"The Force can go to hell, Carth."

"Bastila?"

The hiss of the door must have awakened him. She cursed silently and tapped the highest security setting for the lock, adding a privacy notice as well.

"Bastila! Where are you, my apprentice?" His voice was stronger now.

"I'm right here," she said, her voice soft, yet carrying through the hushed apartment. He appeared in the doorway, gaunt-framed and sunken-cheeked. She hurried to his side. "I'm right by your side," she said. "Always."

"The ghosts came back," he said softly, burying his face in her hair. "They were almost quiet for a while, but then they came back." His arms--skin and bone and sinew and little else--wrapped around her and squeezed tightly. "They threw rocks at my mind." A tremor wracked his body and she was hard-pressed to convince herself that she hadn't heard his very bones rattle in their sockets.

"It's okay," she said. "I'm here now. They won't hurt you." She counted his ribs through the thin shirt he wore.

He shifted his posture. "Have them executed, my apprentice. The Sith do not tolerate weakness." His grip around her waist tightened painfully. "Execute them until they don't come back."

He was hurting her now. She endured it--he didn't understand what he was doing--and led him back to the darkened bedroom. "Come, my Master. Your will shall be done."

Tendrils of the Force drifted outwards from him and wrapped around her. "Are you still my lover and apprentice?" he asked, his voice suddenly light and teasing. "You promised, you know. Said you'd help me reclaim my throne. No takesy-backsies." He grinned, the memory of the charm he once wielded with impunity in the laugh lines around his mouth. A nanosecond was all it took to make her heart skip and remind her of a random day under the bright radiance of Tatooine suns, and the mask of an amoral rogue slipped to reveal a noble man who cared enough to learn from the legends of a people most of the galaxy wrote off as violent and primitive.

The grin faded, a confused and vague look settled back on his face. "Is this my throne room?"

She bit down on her lips, both of them, until sharp pain drove away the stinging ache behind her eyes. "If you like," she said. "This can be your throne room, my lord." She shuffled him over to the bed and gently, firmly pushed him down. His eyes flicked around the room, settling on her for a brief moment. She remembered them from a better time, green and fey and dancing with imprudent amorality as he'd relieved a Czerka Rep of credits and convinced her that a stroll around Kashyyyk's Great Walkway was just the thing she needed.

Now they clouded over, recognizing her, but little else. The ghosts who threw rocks at his mind lurked there, lived there. Stood between him and her, and spirited him away to a place far beyond the Outer Rim. Dared her to follow and mocked her inability to do so.

She tucked the light blanket around his legs and put one hand on his shoulder to help him lean back when suddenly, his body tensed again.

He sat up ramrod straight and flung his hand out, knocking her to one side. She stumbled against the small table next to the bed. "Come back to the light, Bastila," he said, his voice suddenly urgent and earnest. "It's not too late for you. It's never too late!" He reached out in front of him, holding his hand out, palm up and fingers extended.

She remembered when he spoke those words to her on the Star Forge. Why can't I defeat you, she'd screeched at him then. Her heart echoed those same words now. Please, she thought, have mercy and make it quick.

Mercy was not in residence. "I will," she murmured, moving around to stand in the spot where his eyes focused. "I will come back to the light." I would flood the galaxy with light, or extinguish every star if it meant I could find you.

"You're not afraid to love anymore?" he asked. His fingers clutched at her hand, shaking with fine tremors. She put a knee on the edge of the bed and let him draw her close.

She pulled his head down to her chest, so he could hear her heart beat, so the sound of her breathing could drown out the shrieking ghosts. We fear only the unknown, she thought. I know what it means to love you. Not fear. There was no room for fear when pain crowded it out. "Noth--" her voice broke, "Nothing would make me f-feel safer--" and gave out, ending on a whisper, "--than to be l-loved by you."