Tales of an Empathic Metamorph: Chapter 8

A/N: A lot of this chapter was inspired by a discussion on the Obsidian forums of Atton's age.  According to the developers he was supposed to be 29 - 32 during the game... which, considering his at least fourteen year history described in the game  made him really, really young when he started fighting.  That really threw me at first... but then I decided to run with it.  Hopefully it worked out well. 

“Do you know why we’ve called you here, Initiate Alevia?” Master Vrook’s harsh voice scratched at her already eroded will.

“Yes, Master Vrook,” she answered meekly as she looked at the floor, concealing the grief, anger and frustration that had built up in her over the last week.

“Via, do you see now why we have discouraged you from forming bonds with your fellow students?” Master Kavar asked her more gently.

She nodded as tears welled up in her eyes.

“While we all have felt the loss of Master Andus and Padawan Gann, you have been affected in ways that we cannot imagine because of your bond with the latter.”

She nodded again and sobbed audibly as tears dripped off her eyelashes and onto the smooth floor of the council chambers.

“A Jedi cannot afford to be so attached to others. We must be free of emotional entanglement so that we may see the Force clearly.”

“We offer you our sympathy, youngling,” Master Vandar spoke, “but we feel that we must help you prevent future complications from these bonds.”

“They must be severed, for your own good, Initiate Alevia,” Vrook insisted.

Her small frame shook visibly at their words.

“Master Vrook will teach you how,” Vandar continued, “so that if you find you’ve formed one in the future you can sever it before it becomes too strong.”

She finally lifted her head up from the floor and looked pleadingly at Master Kavar as she wiped her tears from her cheeks with the heel of her palm. Yes, child, mine too. He spoke through their bond gently. It is for the best.

She sucked in a deep breath as Vrook placed his firm hand on her shoulder. She wanted to yell at them. This wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. She couldn’t keep the bonds from forming and now they wanted her to sever them. If it felt anything like when Gann had been ripped from her… she’d rather die now than endure that again.

Her bond with Gann had been formed in the first weeks after her arrival here at the Temple and when he and his master had died in a shuttle crash she had collapsed in the middle of combat practice. When she awoke hours later, she felt like a giant piece of her had vanished. She became despondent and that was enough to convince the council that something had to be done.

She gritted her teeth and followed Vrook out of the council chambers toward a nearby meditation room. Once inside, she sat across from the old man and let her eyes meet his bravely. He nodded in as reassuring a manner as he could muster and began the meditation. In her mind his voice echoed ominously, directing her toward the tendrils of Force energy that radiated out from her aura.

When he focused on the bond with Kavar she began to shake in fear. No, not that one first, she pleaded silently, a different one, with one of the students. But Vrook circled it mercilessly as he waited for her to accept her fate. Knowing that there was no stopping this, she took a deep breath and nodded.

Vrook latched onto the tendril and snapped it violently.

She cried out and her whole body convulsed as a searing pain rolled through her followed by an unimaginable sense of loss. Tears burst from her eyes and she collapsed on the floor of the meditation room in a quivering mass.

The overwhelming sense of loss still hung over Alevia when she awoke. She hadn’t had that particular nightmare since before Malachor and she’d almost forgotten it had happened. She’d been eleven.

She sat on the edge of her bunk for a moment and tried to regain her mental balance. In some ways it was comforting to be having her own nightmares again and not her pilot’s. At least this gnawing, hollow feeling was familiar to her. It occurred to her that she should probably ask Kreia about the nightmares and their increasing frequency, but decided that it could wait until morning. She pulled on her clothes and her boots, attached her newly constructed lightsaber to her belt and headed toward the ramp.

She poked her head into the garage before she left and smiled at the sight of her tech, nestled in between the workbench and the port wall of the garage, asleep on the make-shift palate where she had visited him so frequently in the two weeks since their arrival here. But his comfort wasn’t what she needed now. He stirred and opened his eyes.

“Hey, General,” he greeted her sleepily. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just another bad dream,” she explained as she shifted on her feet restlessly. “I’ve gotta get out of here for a little bit. Thought I’d head to the cantina and get a drink.”

He nodded. “Be careful, there are a lot of Exchange thugs out there with itchy trigger fingers.”

“I will be,” she promised. She gave him a tight smile and turned toward the ramp.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw her pilot standing in the main hold, a bewildered expression on his face. Their eyes met and she saw in them her own grief, a reflection of the loss and emptiness of her nightmare. She nodded slightly at him, acknowledging that she knew what he’d seen and headed out alone into the Nar Shaddaa night.

Alevia sat by herself at a table in the Red Sector’s cantina, taking long swigs from her glass of juma as she fiddled absentmindedly with another already empty glass on the table. As the familiar lightheadedness came over her she decided that it had been entirely too long since she had been drunk. This is what she had been looking forward to since Atton first started talking about Nar Shaddaa all the way back on Peragus. She had always envisioned that he’d be here with her, though, sharing a drink and few laughs.

She took another long swig, hoping to cut off that particular train of thought before she began dwelling on the Twi’lek that had “informed” her of her pilot’s unsavory past and the nightmares that had let her experience it first hand. The emotional backlash from her own nightmare was bad enough at the moment.

She sighed heavily as she glanced around the room at the other patrons, as much out of habit as anything, but also needing a distraction. She needed something to take her mind off – and perhaps subdue – the lingering emptiness. A tall, burly man across the room caught her eye and she studied him intently. He had short brown hair and his clothes suggested he was a spacer of some sort. He wasn’t the most attractive man she’d ever laid a trap for, but he’d do. Eventually he turned toward her and she let her eyes meet his. She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows in a summoning gesture.

He smiled slightly and crossed the room toward her. They always did. “Need something, miss?”

“Just looking for someone to share a drink with me,” she said with a long glance down his torso and then back up to his eyes. “Interested?”

“You buyin’?” He flashed a flirtatious grin as he settled into the chair across from her.

"Of course.” She signaled to the waitress and in a moment two more glasses of juma had been delivered to the table.

He gave her his name and asked for hers. “I hate my name,” she said perfunctorily as she downed another swig of her drink.

“So change it,” he said, amused by her deviation from the usual cantina banter.

“That’s what I hate about it. I don’t have to change it; everyone else does that for me.” It was obvious from the expression on his face that he wasn’t following her at all. She shook her head. “Sorry, don’t worry about it, just call me Al.”

“Al?” He chuckled. “Is that really your name?”

“Close enough for our purposes.” Alevia offered him a sultry grin as she rested her chin on her hand and let her eyes drift over him.

“Hello, Al, it’s nice to meet you.” He smirked as he leaned back in his chair.

A loud grating noise cut across the cantina’s music as a third chair was drug away from her table and her pilot plopped down into it, his arm hanging over the back and half leaning against the table. She glowered at him.

“What are you doing here?” she growled.

“Bao-Dur told me where you’d gone and I just thought I’d see what kind of trouble my boss was getting herself into,” he said with a wry grin as he ordered his own glass of juma and then turned toward the table resting his forearms on the small surface.

“Go back to the ship, Atton,” she snapped as her new friend shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“He also told me about the Twi’lek,” Atton added casually, “and a little more about the nightmares. And after what I saw tonight, I think we have some things we need to talk about.”

“I’m busy, Atton. It can wait ‘til morning.”

The casual look on his face vanished suddenly as he leaned over the table, bringing his face close to hers. “Listen, Levy,” he growled as he jabbed a finger at her. “You may not be sleeping with me anymore, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to let you screw him tonight,” he said with a jerk of his head towards the other man.

At that, the man stood and nodded to her briefly. “Thanks for the drink, miss,” he said curtly as he stepped away from the table.

Alevia was furious. “Damn it, Atton, who I choose to screw isn’t any of your business.”

He glared at her, his stony eyes silently challenging her assertion as he downed his glass of juma and held up three fingers to the waitress signaling for more. She sat in silence with her arms crossed, attempting to burn holes in his chest with her eyes.

“I don’t know about you,” he said as he played with his empty glass, “but it’s been way too long since I got really, fracking drunk.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I need to get drunk.”

They sat in silence until their new drinks arrived and Atton began drinking again, more slowly this time. “I’m sorry I accused you of crawling into my head,” he finally said without looking up at her, “I didn’t think it was possible that you could have just dreamed them along with me, at least not until it happened to me. I’m sorry you saw those things.”

“Yeah, Jaq, I bet you are,” she snapped.

“Don’t call me that,” he snarled as his fists balled up in rage.

“Why, not? It’s your name, isn’t it? Even the Twi’lek said you weren’t Atton and that you showed up here during the Jedi Civil War.”

“I’m as Atton, as Atton will ever be,” he replied indignantly, “and whoever your trusted informant is, he’s right. I did show up on Nar Shaddaa during the war… along with a lot of other refugees.”

“You were no refugee.”

“No? The colonies on my home world were wiped out by the Mandalorians, same as most everyone else that was here.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Jaq. You know what I’ve seen.”

The look in his eyes was deadly as he said in a very low voice “Never use that name again.”

She met his gaze, her own anger seeping out as the two sat there silently fuming over their drinks. After several minutes of the impasse, Alevia finally let out a long sigh.

“Okay, fine, Atton, why don’t you go ahead and say whatever it is you think I need to hear.”

“Nope,” he said, the casual tone in his voice returning at the use of his chosen name. “I need to be way more drunk before we get to that scrag.”

The corners of her mouth twitched slightly as she nodded, “I’ll drink to that.” She downed the rest of her drink and took one of the three he’d ordered as he shot her a playful glare.

She shrugged with a smirk. “This’ll be my fourth. You’d better try to catch up, flyboy.”

His eyes lit up at her challenge and he flagged the waitress down again and ordered a bottle of Corellian Lum and two shot glasses. “If we’re gonna play this game, we should play it right.”

“Corellian Lum? You couldn’t get the cheap stuff?”

“Nah, we drink that much juma, we’re gonna spend all night in the ‘fresher” he said with a grin. “Besides, you can afford it.”

She returned his grin, enjoying this sexy, pain in the ass, side of him. “You should be warned, I’m a sappy drunk.”

“Oh really?” his eyes lit up. “So if I get you completely plastered you’ll confess your undying love for me?”

“Probably,” she said with a sigh. “Or so I’ve been told. I don’t actually remember much of the incidences themselves. Which is a really awkward way to wake up, let me tell you.” He snickered and she shot him a look. “Oh, right, like that’s never happened to you.”

“Nah, even drunk I don’t stick around till morning.”

The waitress returned with the bottle of lum and after Atton filled the glasses, the two of them threw back the shots in unison and clanked their glasses on the table.

The lum had a pleasant, satisfying burn to it and Alevia smiled as it warmed her throat. “Five weeks,” she said as she watched him refill her glass.

“What?”

“It’s been five weeks since I picked you up…”

“And?” he asked as he gulped down another shot.

“Which morning aren’t you sticking around for?” she asked with a grin.

“The one after you confess your undying love for me,” he replied with a wink.

“Well, scrag, and here we were finally making up…” she chuckled.

“Tell me something,” he said in a serious tone after another round of shots. After a dramatic pause he leaned forward with a grin and asked, “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done when drunk?”

“A Falleen” she deadpanned as his eyes widened in surprise. “What? She was gorgeous!” she added as he choked on his drink.

After his fit of coughing subsided he croaked out, “Seriously?”

She let out a raucous laugh. “You wish, flyboy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed with a nod as his mind apparently chased the image that had popped into his head. “I’d pay good creds to see that.”

“Men,” she scoffed.

“Hey, you brought it up,” he said as he held up his hands in innocence.

She giggled. “Yeah, I guess I did.” She slid down in her chair and kicked her feet up into his lap.

He patted her booted ankle affectionately before reaching into his jacket and pulling out a pack of cigarras and lighting one up. Her eyes brightened and with a chuckle he handed her his and lit a second one for himself. In her semi-reclined position she became mesmerized by the twinkling of the reddish hued cantina lights as the smoke curled up to the ceiling.

They sat in silence for a few minutes each lost in their own thoughts before he prodded her gently, “So, tell me about the dream I had tonight.”

“What’s to tell?” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “I was eleven. They were trying to help. It wasn’t their fault it hurt so much.”

“But,” he twisted his face in confusion, “what were they doing to you?”

She looked puzzled for a moment and then realized he didn’t have any context for the images he’d seen. “They severed a Force bond,” she explained as she swung her feet off his lap and sat up straight. “It’s not unusual for a Jedi to develop a bond with another Jedi they work closely with. Usually it will begin during the Master and Padawan relationships.”

“But that’s normal right?”

She tilted her head in partial concession. “That is, but I didn’t have one Force bond, I had thirteen.” His eyes widened in surprise as she continued. “Or, I’d had thirteen before Gann died. The masters warned me countless times not to form them with the other students. But I couldn’t help it.”

She thought for a moment as she refilled her glass. “Gann and I arrived at the temple about the same time. We were four years old and very close. And when he died…” her face twisted up, trying to think of a way to explain. “Have you ever pulled weeds?”

He chuckled. “Sure, there’s lots of that when you grow up on a farm.”

She smiled, surprised at his humble origins. “When a Force bond forms,” she began to explain, “it grows, a lot like a plant. The person’s aura roots itself in yours and the longer it’s allowed to develop, the deeper, and stronger that root system gets.

“When Gann died, it was like someone pulled him right out of me. But like when you pull weeds, you don’t just get the roots, you get everything that those roots are wrapped around as well.”

“So they were pulling out the other bonds in your dream?”

“Sorta,” she said as she downed another shot of lum. “They actually severed the bonds, rather than pulled them… but again, like a plant, if you remove the part above the soil, the roots will wither and die.”

“It hurt,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “Yeah, it hurts a lot. Not sure why. It may just be the subconscious mind trying to make sense of the mental pain.”

“So why did I see your dream?”

She gave him a wry grin. “For the same reason I saw yours… when you have a Force bond with someone sharing dreams, nightmares and visions is pretty common.”

His eyes widened slightly at her implications. “Are you going to sever it?”

“If you want me to, I will. I certainly didn’t mean for it to form, but if it were up to me, I wouldn’t.”

He nodded slowly, leaned back in his chair and took a long draught off his cigarra. He seemed lost in thought for a while before he finally broke the silence again. “I was thirteen,” he said solemnly, “when the Mandalorians started attacking colonies in our sector.”

Her eyes flicked to his and he gave her a faint, sad smile. “I left home when I was fifteen to join the Republic forces that had gathered to protect our system. The hope was that we’d stop them before they got to my colony, but of course with the time the Republic wasted planning and trying to get the Jedi to join us, we didn’t even engage them before they started bombing. The whole colony was wiped out.”

Alevia breathed in sharply. “I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged. “That part of the story is the same as anyone else who lived out there. For a year after I joined we lost battle after battle. Usually arriving too late to do anything but cleanup, not that there was ever much left.

“By the time Revan and the rest of you joined the war, we were so grateful that someone had the balls to defy the Jedi Council that we would have followed him to hell and back.” He took another long drag off his cigarra before adding, “I did.”

She studied his face for a moment as he looked into his empty glass, gazing through it to some other far away time. She couldn’t place what exactly was so different about him now, as compared to in the mirror in his dream, but he had changed quite a bit. For one thing, he had lost quite a bit of his youthful lankiness. Ten years would do that to a person, she supposed, but there was also something else, too. Somehow, he was just more than he had been – more balanced, more mature, more of himself.

“I was nineteen when the Jedi Civil War began.” He started again, and then let that thought hang there as he grabbed the bottle and refilled their shot glasses. He tossed his back and she took hers and sipped it, waiting patiently for him to resume his story.

He lit another cigarra and continued, “When Revan turned on the Republic, I knew where I belonged. Without the Jedi, without Revan and you, the Republic would have lost the war and we’d all be Mandalorian slaves or corpses. He saved us.”

She nodded slightly, encouraging him to keep going.

“After Malachor, after the Mandalorian Wars, that’s when the Sith teachings started spreading through the ranks.” He shifted almost nervously as he leaned against the table. “We knew where our loyalties lay – to the Jedi who came to help us, not the ones who sat back on Dantooine and Coruscant, watching us die. So when those same Jedi who let us be slaughtered by the millions decided to start fighting us during the Jedi Civil War, we fought back. I fought back.”

“Fought?” For a moment Alevia saw the young Jedi girl’s face in her mind.

“No, you’re right, I didn’t fight Jedi, I killed them. A lot of them.” She watched him shift nervously again as his hands twirled an unlit cigarra between his fingers.

“People say killing Jedi is hard. It’s not. You just have to be smart about it. No blasters, no getting close to them, no attacking them directly when you can gun down their allies instead.

“There’s ways of gassing them, drugging them, making them lose control, torturing them… I was really good at it.” She watched him closely as he spoke. There was regret in his voice, but it was also tinged with pride.

“What’s worse is that killing them wasn’t the best thing. Making them fall… making them see our side of it, that was the best.”

She shuddered as the vision of his effect in the force slammed into her again. She leaned forward suddenly, grabbing the bottle off the table and refilled her glass.

His eyes shot to hers and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said simply.

After another thoughtful pause he said, “Revan knew that whoever had the most, the strongest Jedi were going to win the Civil War. If Revan couldn’t convert Jedi, then Revan would kill them.”

“So Revan trained elite Sith units into assassination squads, whose duty was to go out and capture enemy Jedi. I was in one of the special units trained to do it.”

“You were so young,” she said as the image of his face in the mirror appeared in her mind.

“Yeah, but I was an experienced veteran by then. I’d fought on the front lines for four years, worked my way up through the ranks, started working in reconnaissance. Revan thought I’d be a good fit for the squad.”

“You knew Revan?” she asked quietly.

He shrugged. “No more than any soldier knows their General. Well, other than Bao-Dur, of course,” he quipped lightly.

She smiled, glad for the comedic interlude, even at her expense. “But you left,” she pointed out. He nodded. “So why tell me all this? Why stick around? Why didn’t you ditch me the second we landed?”

“I don’t know if I understand it half the time. I guess I just thought that you might understand. You’ve killed Jedi, too. Different circumstances, but you have a bigger body count than I ever did. Maybe I thought if you knew who I was, you could set a story straight if it needed to be.”

“You left because of the vision in that second dream,” she pondered the idea aloud.

He nodded. “She showed me the Force and how what I was doing…” his words trailed off and she touched his hand gently. She knew, she understood.

“So I left. I fled with the displaced war veterans, came here and lost myself, until the war came to an end. I wanted no more of Jedi, or Dark Jedi, or the Force. I just wanted to be left alone.”

She gripped his hand tightly. She definitely understood that sentiment. His eyes met hers and he tilted his head slightly. “And then I met you on Peragus. And I thought, maybe, maybe she had saved me so that I could help you. And if I can’t, then I have to try.

“I didn’t want to tell you any of this,” he admitted. “But… you saw it for yourself... and I just want you to understand why I’m still here… I can’t let you think I was doing it for something other than the past.”

“The past is what drives us all, in one way or another,” she said softly, her own thoughts flicking back to her dream.

He followed her train of thought instinctively. “When I felt the loss you felt…” he paused, as if trying to search for words. “The only time I’ve ever felt anything close to that was when I was standing in a crater that had once been my home, knowing that my mother and sister were charred into the soot somewhere.”

“I’m sorry Atton, I didn’t mean for you to feel that.”

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I’m glad I did. It made me understand a few things.

“Once, a Jedi showed me the Force – I heard it, I felt it. At the time, there was too much pain to confront it – because if I did, it meant I would be changed into something else. Now, I’m not afraid of it anymore. And I think that by learning how to use it – I can help protect you. Or at least buy you some time when disaster comes screaming in.”

Alevia smiled at his eagerness. “I’ll train you if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“It is. After your dream…I feel like I’ve found you for a reason.”

“All right, but if we’re going to be training together, I insist that you teach me the Echani techniques you know, as well as anything else that might be useful.”

“Deal.”

“One other thing,” she said lightly as she leaned over the table towards him, “I’m not sure I can take any more shared nightmares. Next time try to include me in a nice, steamy dream, will you?”

He grinned rakishly, with a twinkle in his eyes and her heart leapt. “I’ll do my best,” he said with a wink.

Her eyes met his and she reached out gently with the Force to explore the man behind the eyes. She found herself floating on a current of rich brown affection, that swirled into turbulent eddies at its edges. He didn’t resist her mental touch as she slid along the edge of his consciousness, pushing slightly until she felt him give and she tumbled through his tangled aura.

She inhaled sharply, her eyes darting away from his, breaking the trance.

“Fall in love,” she mumbled almost inaudibly as her gaze settled somewhere across the room.

“Huh?” he questioned as his eyes chased after hers.

“The craziest thing I’ve ever done when drunk,” she added as her eyes darted back to his then to the ceiling as she threw back another shot.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Oh really? With who?”

She just smiled as her eyes flicked back to his. “I told you I’m a sappy drunk.”

He grinned. “Does that mean it’s time to take you back to the ship? Before you start making confessions you won’t remember in the morning?”

“I guess that depends on if you want to hear the confessions or not.”

He stood and pulled a stack of credits out of his pocket and tossed them on the table. “Come on, let’s get you home before I’m obligated to ditch you before breakfast,” he said with a wink.

She shook her head. “No, not to the ship. I’m enjoying this… I’m not ready for the others to come crowding back in again just yet.”

He leaned on the back of his chair and considered her for a moment, then appearing to make up his mind about something; he nodded once, straightened and held out his hand to her. Wordlessly she stood and took his hand, her eyes searching his face for some idea of where they were going, but found nothing to reveal his destination. He grabbed the almost empty bottle of lum off the table and began to make his way out of the cantina.

They meandered through the streets, turning here and there, but continually moving with purpose toward the refugee sector. He stopped briefly at a merchant and bought some food and a blanket. She grinned at the idea of a picnic, but followed him silently.

When they arrived in the sector, he led her through the cargo containers that were used for housing. The normally bustling sector was quiet at this early hour, only the occasional snore of its residents broke through the stillness of the night. In the far corner of the sector, Atton ducked between one of the containers and the sector wall and pulled her in behind him. The space was tight and just as she was beginning to think he was crazy, they ran into a sealed door in the wall. Actually, it was almost more of an access panel than a door, but either way, Atton had his security tunneler out of his jacket pocket and had the lock jimmied in no time. He winked at her, and ducked under the low doorframe as he slid a foot carefully along the inside of the opening and found a rung. He climbed a few rungs of the ladder and then squatted so his head was level with the door.

He held out a hand to her and with a curious smile she followed him onto the ladder before he resealed the door behind them. They climbed for quite a while, past a couple more of the small doors until they got to the top of the ladder. Above them, a circular hatch blocked their way. Atton wrapped a leg around the side of the ladder and began using both hands and his security tunneler on the lock for the hatch. In a moment, the familiar clicking of a successful pick sounded and the hatch twisted open. He grinned down at her and then unwrapped his leg and climbed out of the long tunnel.

She followed him, and when her head poked out of the hatch, she drew in a sharp breath. They emerged onto the roof of the buildings below and the twinkling of the distant lights in the endless city of the Smuggler’s Moon caught her by surprise in its simple beauty. Atton helped her out of the access tunnel and wrapped his arm around her waist as she stood beside him.

“It’s beautiful,” she said breathlessly as she took in the stunning view.

His eyes drifted across the scenery and settled on her face. “Yeah.”

Her gaze flitted to meet his as he lifted his hand to caress her cheek. The intensity of his eyes began to bore into her soul and she shifted almost nervously under his touch. She started to tell him how much she had missed him over the last couple of weeks and how sorry she was that she’d let her fears control her for so long, but before she could utter a single word his lips were pressed to hers.

As their tongues intertwined she reached out to him through the Force and tugged gently at his consciousness. His kiss faltered for a moment as he tried to follow her mental pull, but soon began again with renewed vigor as she wrapped her presence around his and drew him deeper into her aura. He followed her willingly and in that moment their minds merged and the emptiness was filled.

Link to Chapter 9 http://hawk.kotorfanmedia.com/node/8167