In its final destruction, Malachor V makes no sound. Dane Surik watches it from the safe distance she's told Bao-Dur to suspend the Hawk, a beautiful ruination of light and rock and pulsating energy - resolute, as she'd been on the bridge of a warship in this same orbit several lifetimes ago.
The only thing audible is her long awaited expel of breath, a release. But in the force, Malachor's death is so loud it's deafening. In the force it convulses and screams and shatters with such a cacophony of noise that she feels her knees shake and then give under the vibration, like the frail limb of a tree, recoiled in the wind before snapping entirely. Malachor has always been Dane and Dane has always been Malachor and when it ends it takes a piece of her with it. She didn't know there was anything left to take.
She fumbles for the first solid purchase she can get and finds it on Bao-Dur's shoulder. His eyes are unmoving from the destruction, the map of his face illuminated in a veil of green light, but the palm that covers her own hand isn't passive - it's as steady and supportive as he's always been. He's looking for stable ground too. He's a tether, a safe place to land. A ruined mess of hidden scars and memories and half-formed regrets guarded behind a cultivated composure, but so is she, and that's why they'll always understand each other.
"I was here with you at the beginning, General, and I'm here with you at the end," he says softly, still looking out into the vacuum of ruined warships that stand as a grim memorial to what they'd done here together.
Dane licks her lips, eyes burning then blurring. She can only do what she had on that bridge ten years ago - nod silently at him.
Soon the others join them in the cockpit to form a crescent of support with her at its core. Mira's touch at her shoulder, Visas' weight at her side. It's a reminder that Malachor hadn't belonged solely to her. They'd all been buried under the weight of the planet's oppressive orbit for so long that to watch it crumble into dust is cathartic. This isn't a true end, she thinks, but it's something close to it, something moving in that direction. She stands in the solidarity her companions provide, thankful she's not facing this moment alone.
But if Kreia's prophecies are to be believed - and something tells Dane that there's credence to them and not just the desperate ruminations of a woman on death's door - they too will scatter like Malachor's remains, fragments lost to the oblivion of space. It's a sobering thought, but not one she is willing to dwell on with more pressing matters at hand.
Two figures are noticeably absent from their cluster in front of the viewport. While bruised and battered, most of her crew had escaped from Malachor without major injury, all save for Atton. His encounter with Sion had incapacitated him severely, and his health and life were still very much in balance.
She'd been the one to find him barely conscious and leaking blood, slumped against a pillar in the academy. He'd babbled brokenly in her ear and she'd hoisted him up, dragged him through crumbling rock and deposited him into Mical's care. His present condition is unknown to her and she swallows around the lump in her throat before detaching herself from the others, turning to Bao-Dur with most of her resolve collected.
When she speaks, it's a General's voice that slips out. "Get us to Telos as fast as possible."
The trance breaks and Malachor releases its hold. Her companions part like shrapnel, and Bao-Dur assents like the obedient soldier he's always been, punching the coordinates into the nav immediately before situating himself in what she's come to associate as Atton's chair. It looks wrong, but she doesn't stare long, hastening out of the cockpit and through the ship towards the medbay.
She's disappointed to find Atton lying supine on the medical table out cold, thought wistfully and perhaps a little high mindedly that her presence alone would rouse him. He looks like pure shit, there's no nuanced way to put it. Lacerations and burns mar his entire body, somewhat healed over due to Mical's ministrations, but still violently discolored.
The worst of it is his face, swollen and purple, his brow split and caked in dried blood. But all of that looks positively juvenile compared to the distinct slash of a lightsaber burn across the left side of his face. It starts at his temple and dips into the hollow of his eye, mercifully shallow but still, nothing on the surface was spared in its wake.
Mical sits on the floor next to the bed with his legs crossed and eyes closed. She can feel tendrils of the force, waves of cool clear energy emanating from his form.
"Am I interrupting?" She asks woodenly from the threshold.
He opens his eyes, looking altogether unsurprised to find her here. "No, no I've healed what I can. I was only meditating. Please, come in."
A small, exhausted smile is spared as he climbs to his feet, still exuding a nerve-eating serenity that often renders images in Dane's mind of socking him unconcious. It's entirely undeserved. Mical has a good heart and holds a moral high ground over ninety percent of the passengers on this ship. Barring maybe T3, but even the droid is on thin ice. And yet his demeanor is so reminiscent of the Masters who'd condemned her that she can't help but feel uncomfortable in his presence, especially when he peers at her with those besotted starry eyes of his.
She certainly doesn't need anybody hero worshipping her.
She hesitates in the doorway, as though drawing near and seeing it all in full detail will only solidify Atton's injuries, make it that much more genuine. Instead, she steps inside and stays on the perimeter, anchored with her back to the wall. "How is he?"
Mical's eyes flit from Dane's face to Atton. "Stable for now. But without more advanced equipment I fear his condition may worsen. He needs a kolto tank."
"I've told Bao-Dur to steer us towards Telos. We should arrive in a day and a half, two at the most."
"He should make it then. I've mended what wounds I could, bandaged his ribs," says Mical, hands illustrating his words. "There's some cerebral hemorrhaging that's beyond my power however. His body has gone into shock from the extent of the trauma."
"His eye…"
"Yes. I'm afraid it couldn't be salvaged."
She swallows hard and looks away, immediately begins to count in her head. Not a pazaak deck, but it's distraction enough. Ironically, she wishes that Kreia were here. The woman had been cantankerous, but made for an extremely adept healer.
Mical touches her shoulder gently. "Dane."
She feels detached from her body, as though she were ballooned above the ship and watching all of this unfold from a great distance. "Could I have a moment alone with him?"
For a split second she thinks he might refuse her and her limbs tense in the breath it takes for him to respond. She can feel him looking at her, gauging her like he wants to say something, but she refuses to reciprocate.
"Of course." He leaves silently and lets the door slide closed behind him.
Dane stands in the quiet for a few seconds, and then with slow careful steps, walks towards the bed. She had been right - it's so much worse seeing him like this up close, with every vein, every swollen and broken part of his body magnified in vivid detail.
He'd been equal parts brave and stupid to face Sion by himself.
But being alone with him in this state also sparks a startling degree of intimacy that compels her to take his cold and brittle hand between both of her own.
His last words to her on Malachor weren't just incoherent babbling. There had been self-deprecation, a slew of apologies, and then to punctuate it all he'd told her that he loved her. Had from the moment they'd met. That, that sentiment alone was fucked up.
You are a cipher, forming bonds, leeching the life of others, siphoning their will and dominating them.
Atton doesn't know about what happened in the ruined courtyard of the Enclave, what was revealed to her there standing before Kreia and the remains of the Council. And how would she have posed such a revelation to him? How does she go about explaining that his attraction to her is manufactured, that he's being conditioned by the force to form an unnatural devotion to her. Atton was so susceptible, perhaps even more so than the others, because he was an empty vessel waiting to be filled. She'd infused her poison into him so completely and he'd confused it for love.
At his confession, she had been horrified, couldn't pass him over into Mical's arms fast enough. She was noxious for him, she was toxic.
There's a sick, barbarous unfairness to it all because there's a part of her that could love him if she tried, truly and undiluted. But she wouldn't exploit him like this, not when he'd confessed to her before that his greatest fear was being persuaded, used by force users against all will and knowledge.
A sigh shakes her exhausted, willowy frame. Her eyes fall to where his vest is folded neatly on a chair and she leans down, plucks a pack of smokes and a lighter from the pocket she knows he keeps them in.
She spares his motionless form a cursory glance, imagining the utter indignation that would cross his face if he caught her.
"Sorry. I need it more than you do."
While the rest of the crew gets some well deserved rest, Dane sits in the pilot's chair, lighting a cigarra and taking several long drags. The tabac is like kolto to her scattered, restless mind. She'd taken it up during her stint in the Outer Rim, had indulged avidly until her reintroduction to the force. Vices like alcohol and cigarras provided distractions that dimmed her connection, stilted awareness. So she'd weeded them out of her life. It hadn't been hard to quit - granted she had only smoked for a few years, and obviously hasn't sworn it off completely - but she doesn't harp after one if she goes days, weeks without a fix.
In moments of stress, it's a different story. She's a veritable addict, burning through smoke after smoke until her lungs start begging for a reprieve. She figures she's earned the right to indulge a little after everything.
Her boots on the console, she nurses the cigarra in one hand and lets the other hang limply down beside her, blondish head sunk hard into the backrest. Lethargy has seeped into her bones, making her movements worn and sluggish. She feels older than she ever has before, a life away from who she'd been on Peragus, a million times removed from the war-torn girl of her youth, all bared teeth and hackles raised.
She was wild then, notorious for her grit in battle, an unrelenting determination verging on ferocity. And Atris was right. She had enjoyed war, had found herself amidst the fires of conflict even while others suffered and died around her. It was a selfish notion, a common feat in her so contradictory to the expectations of a Jedi. Kavar had disparaged her over it time and time again in that tight lipped but well-intentioned way of his. You do not consider the effect your actions have on others. You dive head first without thought of the consequences as long as your own odds are guaranteed.
At the time she'd jeered at the notion she was capable of any such fault, pushed him to a boiling point so she could laugh at the flustered countenance her defiance would evoke. She was invincible, she was proud, she was well on her way to General. She was a child. A stupid, selfish child playing at war.
Now Kavar is dead and she's relieved. A man who had taken her under his wing, had treated her with an undeserved amount of compassion and understanding, the likes of which she'd never before been exposed to - she questions that now, as she's questioned all relationships since the nature of her force bond was revealed to her. Still, he was a man she'd come to love and admire and immolate to a varying degree and she's relieved it had been him with the other members of the Council to meet their end in the wreckage of the Enclave, and not her.
Stupid, stupid selfish child.
She snubs her cigarra on the console - it's an old ship what's one more stain? Atton has been ashing his smokes here for months - and lights another.
It's the same old melancholic trill she's been reciting for a decade now. She thought she'd feel different, lighter after Malachor's cataclysm. Thought her transgressions would be sucked away with the planet's collapsing atmosphere in some naïve notion that they directly correlated. Malachor was never a reason, it was a consequence. She doesn't even feel worse than she did before, which would have been a welcome alternative to the mind numbing emptiness that pervades her now.
It would have been poetic to sink with Malachor. It's a thought that's been consuming her slowly, from the moment that the planet's eradication became a possibility, would have been so easy to close her eyes and let it finish what it'd started. No one would fall victim to her influence ever again, no more lives fed to sustain her insatiable, uncontrollable appetite for power.
And yet before she can follow that particular string of thought any further, something distracts her. A new string of an altogether different color, different aura, yet familiar to her all the same. Halcyon like a happy forgotten memory suddenly brought to light. She pursues that chord instead and smiles when she discovers its source.
Hi Atton.
Whether he'd sought her mind out consciously or not doesn't matter; she can feel him as clearly and tangibly as though he were sitting right beside her, sharing a bottle of Corellian whiskey and dealing her a hand of pazaak. Just like old times.
It's all doom and gloom up here. You might want to go back to the medbay.
He's still a novice at projecting his own thoughts to her, regardless of his proficiency at blocking everyone else out, but she can hear his mocking cadence in her ear so clearly that she wonders if he's made a sudden breakthrough or if she can merely predict his responses that accurately.
And spend all night cooped up in there with blondie? Not fucking likely.
She laughs genuinely, pulling her legs close and hugging her knees to her chest. Reaching out like this, amassing at least a sliver of strength to attempt communication intentionally or otherwise: it's a good sign. She hadn't been able to find him earlier, had barely felt any presence in him at all. It'd terrified her initially but she knows what his impromptu visit is trying to relay to her now - he's still here.
She shoves her guilt aside, compartmentalizes it to draw upon at another time. Illuminated by the blue glow of hyperspace as they hurl towards Telos and curled up with Atton's quiet presence in her mind, sleep finds her easily.
AN: Hi all, welcome to my angsty slowburn post-kotor fic I've been wanting to write forever. This game means so much to me but there are going to be some deviations from canon because let's be real, the ending was a big old mess. Remember that Drew Karpyshit guy? I sure don't and you shouldn't either. The chapters are split between Dane's and Atton's perspectives so the next chapter is going to be from Atton's pov and should be posted within a few days or so. I love hearing from readers, so any thoughts/comments are super appreciated.