Shadow Catching
Summary: There were times, Kavar knew, when the most merciful action was not the attempt to heal but the finishing stroke. Kavar/DSFExile. Written in response to Trillian4210's challenge on her Request-A-Fic board.
Kavar found her in the final moments of daylight, when the sun bled gold across the plains and the edges of everything were watercolor-soft in the cooling velvet shadows. A single tree arched free of the waist-high grass, its leaves parched and dying, the mottled yellow-brown of a fading bruise. Katya stood motionless in its tangle of roots, face turned to the setting sun. Now and then, her heavy veil fluttered in the breeze and allowed a glimpse of what remained of her face.
She did not look up when Kavar said her name, but motioned that he should join her. For a time they sat quietly, sharing the comfortable silence that evolves between old friends. Then the wind ran its fingers through the grass, and the locusts halted their droning mantra.
"Remember when we used to sit like this?" Her voice was just loud enough to be heard in the sudden silence. "I'd be so homesick I could hardly see straight, and you'd distract me by telling me war stories."
"I remember, Katya."
She turned, now, and lifted her veil. The waning light was kind to her injuries, but nothing could hide the metal pins and stitches, the synthskin and pressure bandages. Underneath it all was the girl who might once have been his Padawan, had life taken a kinder path. He could still see the dusting of freckles across her nose.
"I wouldn't mind a little distraction now," she said.
Kavar smiled faintly. "I'd think you'd be sick of war."
The curving of her lips was empty reflex. Nothing he'd felt from her had seemed genuine from the moment she'd appeared in the Academy courtyard with a featureless glass sphere in one eye socket and a long black veil to keep the dust out of her wounds.
No, he amended. The way she looked at me when I spoke my judgment, like the Wars had left a knife stuck in her chest and I was twisting it . . . That much was real.
High above them, an enormous ray-like brith wheeled from one thermal to the next. Katya watched its shadow glide across the grass.
"I don't know what Revan's planning, if that's what you came to ask. All I know is that many people will die because of it." Her fingers knotted in her robe, but her good eye continued to placidly follow the distant shadow. "More than already have."
Kavar thought of a freckle-faced child fishing insects out of the courtyard fountain so they wouldn't drown and quickly pushed the memory away before more could follow. "Do you regret what you did at Malachor V?"
"Does it matter? They won't be any less dead either way." She fell back against the tree trunk and smoothed her bandages with the heel of her hand. "I'm done defending myself against you, Kavar. If the only reason you came here was to relive my trial, I'd just as soon get an early start on exile."
The sense of unfinished business between them had needled him to seek her out, but what more could he say without betraying the Council? Though her sentence did not sit well with him, Katya Deleón's presence was exactly the sort of unknown variable the Jedi could not afford when matching wits with Revan.
"Very well," he said. "Goodbye, Katya. May the–" he faltered, the habitual farewell turning bitter on his tongue. "May you find peace, my friend."
He'd taken no more than a step when she spoke again, and the misery in her voice was achingly real.
"Don't go." Her head was bowed, her hands tightly clasped over her stomach, her eyes closed as though she expected a blow. "I didn't mean it."
"Katya . . ."
"Just stay and talk a while. Ask me another question, shout at me, I don't care. Keep my mind off of everything like you used to." Her voice dropped to a broken whisper. "Please, Kavar."
There were times, Kavar knew, when the most merciful action was not the attempt to heal, but the finishing stroke. Katya had once disagreed with this wisdom, quite vocally and in the middle of a group lesson–one of the rare occasions he'd found himself on the receiving end of a tirade from the notoriously ill-tempered student. He wondered, with a weary flicker of curiosity, if years of battle had changed her mind where his best efforts could not.
"I can't help you," he told her. "To forget what you've done would be a disservice to those whose lives you've unjustly taken. You must face the consequences of your actions, and you must do it alone."
Katya sobbed once, a single strangled gasp, then clenched her jaw and slammed her fist into the rough bark at her hip. Anger and betrayal waged war in her expression, only to be defeated at last by a terrible, mask-like blankness. Her brow smoothed, and the tension left her shoulders even as blood began to drip from her fingers and soak into the dust at her feet.
At the sight of blood, the tethers on Kavar's heart finally snapped. He went to her and took her hand, turning it over and examining her injury in the light just like he'd done a hundred times when she was young and couldn't leave an instructor's sight for five minutes without ending up in a fight with one of the other children.
I fell, she would say, eyes avoiding his, and Kavar never had the heart to let her know he could see right through it. Then you must learn to catch yourself, he would tell her, and press a wooden practice sword into her small hands.
He felt the Force move through him, a prickling warmth that spread from his hand to hers. They both watched as the abraded skin across her knuckles re-knit and faded to a pale pink scar. Then even that disappeared.
Katya's lips parted, and for a moment Kavar was convinced he would hear those words again, I fell, as though Malachor had left her with nothing worse than a scraped knee, with some wound he could see and touch and fix.
"You know, Kavar," she said, "there are those who think that you, not Revan, should have led us into battle." The shadow of a grin touched her lips. "They seem to think that you could have saved the Republic without all the death and destruction . . . Without Malachor V."
Kavar tried to let go of her hand; she caught hold of his fingers and held him there with surprising strength.
"War has always been close to your heart, as it is to mine." Katya pressed his hand to her chest to feel the slow, steady rhythm of her pulse. "So, my dearest friend, tell me this: if you had answered the call to save thousands of innocent lives as I know a part of you wanted to . . ." She smiled again, and this time there was cruelty in it. "Could you have saved me?"
It was like a spark, igniting something in Kavar he hadn't realized he'd been hiding until it blazed into life. He caught double handfuls of her robe and slammed her hard against the tree.
"I will not be blamed for the path you've taken!"
Her calm did not falter. Kavar imagined her heart still beating the same unhurried tempo in her chest, and the thought enraged him.
Suddenly it was all around them: the dead spot in the Force, the echo, the wound. He felt the chill emptiness at the pit of her soul lick out hungrily to taste his anger, felt her hunger, her fear and her terrible loneliness, felt it become his own.
Katya twisted against him and her robe came open in his hands. He hesitated, stumbling half a step backward even as his fingers slipped down to trace the warm plane of her stomach. Then her mouth was pressed against his, his name a breathy plea between them that he felt more than heard.
The last crimson haze of sunset slipped beneath the horizon, and she drew him down into the grass.
Kavar awoke to find Katya gone and the sun blazing high in the center of the sky. He felt bone-weary and sick, as though a fever had just broken. He saw, now, that her rejection of the Force had not been as thorough or as final as the Council had believed. The bonds she had always been so gifted at forming with others had been twisted, warped into something far more dangerous.
His lightsaber lay nearby, pillowed on a neatly folded square of black cloth. I did not take it, that careful arrangement said, but I could have. He clipped the weapon to his belt, then took up the veil and ran it between his fingers.
How far will you fall before you catch yourself? he wondered. Will you learn to make peace with your past, or will you give in to anger and pain because they make you feel whole again for a time? He felt the echo of heat against his skin and feared he knew the answer.
Kavar let the wind tear the veil from his hand. He stood motionless in the tangle of roots, still watching long after it had drifted far across the grass and become nothing but a single spot of shadow in a sea of gold.