Red-Shift
Revan
I wanted to reach out to them, but I didn't know how. Bastila was the only person I seemed to be able to share some connection with. But that's only because I'm observant. The same beast that gnawed at my entrails ate at hers. "Join me in meditation?" I asked.
She nodded and we settled in meditative postures. We practiced manipulating small objects to warm up, then sank into that expanded awareness I had come to expect from being a Jedi. I let the life force of the people around us, and the people on the Stella Arcos where we were berthed, flow through me. The rainbow of personalities never failed to awe me.
But the color-shift in that rainbow was subtly different. Bastila's calming coolness, her arrogant confidence, was different. A broken doll, I thought.
Tendrils of red and black recriminations wove through Bastila's psyche, and their cousins in my own mind reached out and danced. My own pain and guilt called to hers and despair threatened to overwhelm me. An unfamiliar need surfaced, the need for pain, punishment. Absolution.
I couldn't say whether it came from me or her, but it frightened me to the core and I broke the connection.
Our eyes met, her blue-green ones as frightened as I felt. Down the hall, from Mission's room, we heard a cry.
I ran from Bastila to Mission. The Twi'lek girl sat up in her bed as I came through the door, having shocked the lock to get to her.
Tears streamed down her face.
"Mission!" I ran to her side.
She looked at me and swiped at her face with the back of her hand. I sat down on the bed next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Her head-tails reached out to me, stroking my own shoulders in kind. "It was awful," she said, sniffling.
"What happened?"
"I--a dream, I guess. But it was so real," she said. "I was somewhere, and all of a sudden, it was like, I hurt. Really bad. So bad that the only thing I wanted to do was to hit myself more, until the pain broke apart inside me."
The feeling was all-too-familiar to me. "It's okay, Mission. It was just a dream." Ashamed of myself and my own actions, I waved my hand and used the Force to erase the dream from her mind.