o.
Meetra finds Revan exactly where she expects to find him, far beyond the academy and near one of the tombs that rests untouched on Dantooine. He's meditating on top of one of the crumbled pillars, dark hair picking up with the faint breeze. She watches him for a moment, his eyes closed, face serene, and she tries to ignore the faint thumping in her chest.
"I'm sure you didn't come all the way out here to just watch me."
A smile tugs at the corners of her lips as she clasps her hands behind her back, rocking on her heels. "Maybe I did. What are you going to do about it?"
"Discourage you." He opens both eyes to pin her down with that unfathomable stare. She's never been able to read what it is that he's thinking, like the others.
"I should have expected that response," she says softly. Her body aches to move forward, take long strides through the grass until she's at his side.
She doesn't.
He unfolds himself from the pillar, stretching out what she's sure are stiff muscles. His gaze never leaves her. "I'm leaving."
"And you're taking Alek."
"Yes."
"But not me."
"Yes," he repeats.
Meetra breaks his gaze, tilting her head back to look up at the sky. It hurts, like a knife to the stomach. "Why am I not good enough?"
His shadow falls over her as his hand clamps down on her shoulder, and she knows she shouldn't be surprised by how quickly, how silently, he's moved. But she is anyway. His touch sears into her skin, sends electricity to pluck at her nerves.
"I'll come back for you, Meetra. Don't I always?"
i.
He does come back for her, and she's all too willing to follow him into war. Not because he beckons her, but because it's the right thing to do. Because Kavar has fought the Mandalorians, too, and he makes her pulse race as well.
It's a bitter disappointment when he forbids her to join the effort and follow Revan.
There's a metallic tang in her mouth when he shuts her off and tells her that she is disrespecting the Order.
What good is an Order if they do not protect the people?
Atris calls her a fool and turns her back as well.
Alek welcomes her with open arms, his touch strengthening her. Revan twists a sable curl around his finger and stares back at her from behind a mask.
ii.
War weighs down on her soul like nothing she has ever faced. She watches her men die with a sorrow she can't explain to anyone else. She takes lives that shouldn't have been hers to take. She tastes it all through the Force and wonders what it is that she's becoming.
Alek leaves every name behind and wears only Malak. The one time she slips up is the first time he's ever hit her, his hand driven by the Force. It's a knife to the stomach.
Her men have to pull her off of him before she chokes the life from him.
Revan never takes off the mask, even in her presence.
He never says a word about the blood that drips from her mouth or bruises Malak carries.
iii.
"You're leaving me," Revan says to her. It's not a question, because they both know she is.
Her hand reaches out to touch the mask on his face, and she feels nothing but the cool metal in return. He lets her touch him, and that makes her wonder. How much can she touch him? How far can she go?
His fingers twirl in dirty, unkempt curls.
"I'm going back to the Order, where we belong."
He tugs at her hair. "You don't belong with those who think nothing of you. You belong with me, Meetra."
Her fingers drift to the edges where persona meets flesh. He's warm, and she's surprised because for a moment, she's thought he might be dead, that the man behind the mask is nothing but a corpse. She peels it off of his face. It's heavy in her hands.
"No I don't," she whispers. She belongs to nothing and nobody, the void in her soul echoing back at her. She's tired, she tells herself. Exhausted from the weight of war and the mask in her hands and the loss of a friendship that had buoyed her. "I'm not good enough for you."
A silence falls over them, broken only by the humming of the ship waiting to carry her home.
"You are. I want you by my side. Only you and Malak are capable of—"
Meetra was never bold before the war, but a few thousand deaths have changed a few things. She cuts him off with a biting kiss, the mask crushed between them. He can't fix the void in her that he's created.
She's a dead star, and he's the whole universe.
iv.
She cuts off her hair after she is exiled. There's a sort of freedom in abandoning curls Revan had buried his hands in, a freedom in not being the General, in being a Jedi.
There's freedom in lying to herself, too.
v.
Nobody recognizes her, but then again, Meetra doesn't stay where she can be recognized. She doesn't feel Revan and Malak's fall. She doesn't hear about the war, a hero turned conqueror.
Sometimes she drifts for months at a time, staring up at the ceiling of her ship and wondering if she could have been enough.
vi.
"I'm not a Jedi," she tells the Republic soldier when he escorts her onto the Harbinger.
vii.
Meetra wonders, after she learns the truth about her loss of the Force, if Revan had known that she was nothing when he said she belonged with him.
She wonders if, perhaps, he would have made use of her connection to death. If he would have made her his own personal Nihlus.
When those thoughts begin to creep over her, she heads to the cockpit and slides into the co-pilot's seat. "Let's play a game."
Atton looks at her like she's the brightest star in the galaxy. Her pulse races, like it always has. "Want to tell me what's on your mind?"
A faint smirk curls at her lips. "Want to tell me what's on yours?"
They play pazaak instead.
viii.
She has spent ten long years ignoring the feeling of Revan in her soul, but when he calls to her, she doesn't hesitate to respond. His wife is pretty, she notes, as they watch the video T3 has kept hidden from her all this time.
She remembers Bastila from the enclave, a little bratty girl who had thought herself better than others. Another Jedi failure, like so many others the masters had created.
She can tell the former Jedi isn't none too excited about Meetra going to find Revan, and she can't blame her for it. After all, Meetra knows Revan in a way that Bastila never will.
And Bastila knows him in other ways.
She clutches the mask to her chest and tries to not think about how gentle he must have been with Bastila in comparison.
ix.
"You're going to him," Atton says lightly, propping his feet up on the chair next to him.
"I need to bring him back," Meetra gently disagrees. The way he looks at her makes her nauseous. "For the galaxy."
"That's the problem with you heroes, you know." He doesn't look at her anymore.
She is broken and hard but her mouth is gentle against his as she takes him into her arms. In all likelihood, she is about to die. And it's not going to be Revan that lingers in her mouth in that case.
x.
There is a canyon between them as they stare at one another. She searches every part of him and commits it to memory, but even though a decade has spanned between them, he is the same as ever.
Her heart beats wildly in her chest, and even his smell can't keep her off of him. They embrace, and it's so real, she might cry. When they escape, she finds small ways to keep touching him, as if she can continue to prove to herself that he's real again. That he wasn't someone she made up.
"I asked for you, after the war," he tells her in the silence of the night after they're sure Scourge is asleep and Revan has exhausted the holovid of his son.
Her head rests on his shoulder, her fingers entwined with his. He is the Revan of old and someone so completely new that she is still trying to piece the two parts together. "Why?"
"I missed you," he admits, and a faint smile creeps over her face. "I let you go when I should have held on." His forehead bumps against hers, and she breathes him in as he does the same to her. "You were too good for me, Meetra."
There's truth in his words, a frank honesty that echoes in the void that is her Force. She takes comfort in that.