In Freefall
As her ship lifts off, she has to virtually tear her eyes away from him to look to the control panel and do the slightly more important thing of flying her home away safely.
It is child's play, of course, but the very fact that she has to consciously think to do so irks her.
She runs through the process, taking the 'Jade's Fire' up through the atmosphere, and then starting to calculate her complicated chain of hyperspace vectors.
It is only when the starlines begin to flow, so beautifully, past the canopy on the bridge, that she relaxes into her seat. And then realises her mind hasn't shaken him yet.
This irks her.
But then she shrugs to herself.
The sparring had been awesome.
They had chosen to leave their lightsabers aside. No weapons at all, in fact.
For all that she was sometimes treated with mild disdain on Yavin (after all, training to become a Jedi Knight is the only worthwhile career choice in the universe), an audience may have gathered when Skywalker had chosen to take her on in hand-to-hand combat.
It wasn't just her that loved it when the Jedi Master chose to play in her sandpit, apparently.
And it had been so much fun. They had spent the better part of an hour desperately trying to immobilise each other, completely ignoring the varied students and instructors that shuffled into the training room, taking up silent places around the expansive combat area their sparring claimed. For the most part, they had even set the force aside, in an unspoken agreement to simply pit their physical skills against one another.
They were both strong, but he was stronger. They were both fast and agile, but she was more so. Towards the end, as it turned out, when they were both feeling a bit bruised and a little weary, the force came back into play.
And despite that, she had won.
She ended up straddling him, her right elbow propped rather lightly but jauntily on his Adam's apple. And her chin resting delicately on her right palm.
She had grinned down at him. "You done, Farmboy?"
He shifted her elbow a touch and grinned back. "How could I not be?"
They looked at each other for a moment that seemed suspended in time.
Then she suddenly had to break away, dragging herself up to her feet, only glancing back down to reach her hand out to his, pulling him upright.
He squeezed her fingers momentarily before she pulled her hand firmly away, turning and sweeping her way out of the room, ignoring everybody but him. "Thanks, Skywalker. See you soon."
She had moved swiftly through the Jedi complex, but found herself unsurprised when she glanced outside of her ship to see him gazing up at her. Openly, kindly, and with a quirky kind of regard she can't quite place, but wants to understand.
It is this last thing that she can't shake. For all of the things they have seen and done, for all that he is now one of her few friends, it is the fact that he is hidden from her, and from everybody else, that she finds intriguing and familiar. They both have a miserably extreme public persona that almost overtakes the real person inside. And knowing how much her personality differs from the general perception, she feels almost compelled to learn about his.
Compelled to care. Wanting to see behind the façade, wanting to simply see the man. For the first time, she finds herself wanting to know another, just for the sake of it.
It is enough to tilt her personal world nearly off its axis.
She suddenly feels as if she is in freefall. But it is blind. She cannot feel where she is, gauge how fast she is falling, or see where she will land.
She likes to believe that has always been, despite the restrictions placed on her in her youth, in charge of her own thoughts and, to perhaps a lesser degree, her destiny.
She sighs, and drums the console with her fingertips.
This current lack of control irks her.