By the time we'd made it to the Ebon Hawk, "her" ship, I couldn't keep my mouth shut anymore. My part was small, yes, but Peragus was gone, blown to bits in an explosion I'd wanted not to be a part of. My anger bubbled over, not just at being inadvertently dragged into this but because both she and Kreia hadn't told me anything. Even the droid knew more than I did, and that was unacceptable to me.
Really, what did I know about these two people? I'd found myself invested in their success, in their survival, but now that we were on our way away to the Republic, on our way to away from where we had been, I felt an uncoiling inside of me. Soon, we wouldn't be isolated, and we'd go our separate ways.
If I managed to slip away without being noticed. Somehow, despite how stunning Nune was, I didn't think I'd get that lucky. Now, I was a part of whatever trouble she was in, and that upset me. I'd strived so hard not to get into any more trouble. I'd avoided everything and everyone to make sure of it.
Now, due to circumstances totally beyond my control, I was following an infuriatingly cryptic Jedi master and her little fledgling pawn. I'd come to appreciate that pawn, yes, but they'd yanked me in without asking. They'd manipulated me into helping, and I felt so angry to have been duped.
I didn't know if this logic was skewed, but I was too pent up, too frustrated, too confused to really care. I just needed to yell, to understand, to get it out.
Of course, she was my easiest and most desirable target.
"Well, now that we just killed a planet, maybe one of you can tell me what's going on. Because between assassin droids, a Sith Lord that looks like he sleeps with vibroblades, and being target practice for a Republic warship, I was better off in my cell!"
"I don't know what's going on!" Nune said weakly.
"That's such bullshit!" I shouted at her. "Do you know what you've just managed to do? Peragus was a fuel depot. The Republic will be hurting without it, and you just blew it up without a second thought!"
"I blew it up?" she shouted back, rising to the challenge in a way that made a monster inside of me laugh with pleasure. "We did all of this together! If I did anything, you helped me do it! You can't shove the blame solely on my shoulders!"
"Sure I can!"
"Oh yeah? And why is that?"
"Because they were after you, weren't they?" I shouted back, inching closer to her all the time. "Not me! Not that old bat! You! And I want to know why!"
She backed away now, removing her eyes from mine. She looked overwhelmed and hit the wall with a small "oof" sound.
"I don't know why," she whispered quietly. "I really don't know what's going on."
"You're such a liar!" I yelled back, jumping at her weakness.
But Kreia cut in, even as she opened her mouth with a scowl that would silence even Republic Senators.
"The Republic warship was the Harbinger," she explained. "This, we knew, and we learned from your room there. It was seized on its way to Telos by the Sith. You must have left shortly before their assault."
I made a point not to notice that Nune shook harder at this, and her knees buckled a little bit under the duress.
"Naturally, they sought you, Jedi," Kreia continued emotionlessly.
"That…makes sense," she finally managed to croak out. "The Sith cruiser. It was the Ravager. It shot us down after…I left." Then, her eyes turned away from mine and they scrunched together with accusation. "How did you know that I left?" she asked with that same vicious tone she'd used on me during her tirade.
"I was on the Ebon Hawk for the duration," she explained simply.
Nune just blinked, which made me feel less bad for doing the same.
"How is that even possible?" she asked outright. "I was asleep, I was…dying. You weren't there. You were…"
I stiffened at this and took her in.
"How long ago was that?" I asked her in surprise.
"I don't know. Maybe…" She put two hands to her head, and she looked so small that way, so lost. "A few days ago?" Her voice was high pitched and she sounded like she was about to cry. "I think five or six – five or six days ago?"
"It has been seven days since you crash landed on a planet named Velabri, where I was waiting in the Ebon Hawk."
She didn't remove her hands from her forehead.
"Why were you there?" Suddenly, her voice became more urgent. "Why were you there with that ship? Where was the owner of the ship?"
"The Ebon Hawk's owner had long since abandoned the ship in those woods, and I had a vision to go to it and wait for one such as you. Upon my arrival, I succumbed to a deep meditation in the cargo hold, and I was not discovered until you were shot down over Peragus."
"A…a vision?" she asked weakly. "To wait for me?"
"That is what I said," she said, beginning to be mildly irritated.
"But I almost died there," Nune argued. "Why didn't you help me?"
"As I said, I was deep in meditation. The limitations of the world around me did not seem of any consequence. Besides, you did not die. I used the Force to rescue you from your wounds and to summon the creatures of that world, manipulating their feeble minds to follow the set of morbid instructions you had prepared with your belongings. From there, your old soldier was hailed, we were picked up by the Harbinger, and you escaped it again just before it must have been bombarded in an attempt to kill you."
"Quite a coincidence," I said sarcastically.
"True," the old woman said with that same vicious condescension. "But as one trained in the Force, it is encumbered upon me to tell you that true coincidences are rare."
"How did we get to Peragus?" she asked the old woman wearily. "It was nearly destroyed by the time we made the jump to hyperspace."
The metal can next to us began to explode with noise, and Kreia and I both sighed angrily.
"Shut that scrap heap up, will you?" I yelled at her.
"He said he repaired the ship!" she snapped back. "Learn to understand! His language isn't that hard!"
"Repaired this ship, my eye!" I shouted back angrily. "Next thing you know it's going to claim credit for saving our skins! If that little noisemaker says it repaired the ship once, then it can prove it by doing it again! Go on, get!"
The droid made a sad kind of noise, and I nudged it towards the hallway into the main hold. It zapped me once, and I swore loudly. I made to kick it, but it zoomed away from me and out of the cockpit.
There was a moment of silence before she took a deep, shaking breath.
"So…why are these Sith after me?" she asked, as if she was afraid of the answer she already seemed to know.
"Because you are the last of the Jedi," the old woman explained.
I felt nauseas. I felt dizzy. I felt weak. All of the feelings that I kept buried deep inside of me came out all at once, and I felt like I might vomit. She stood less than a foot from me. We'd advanced on one another in our anger. At the time, it had ignited something inside of me, a pleasure and an anger that came with physical attraction. It was a need, closer to a desire but also a need to dominate.
But the realization, the confirmation, that Nune was a Jedi was too much. I felt like an affront. I felt like I didn't deserve to stand in the same room. I felt, more than anything else, shame and fear. I took a step away from her carefully, so neither of them would notice, and I was consumed by a moment of overpowering emotions.
This woman, this small woman, this beautiful woman, was the last of her kind. Not only did the loss of the Jedi seem so insurmountable, but it also seemed so much more terrible. That had been the goal, sure but to see it achieved was…unthinkable.
When I emerged, Nune seemed to have thought the same thing.
She finally leaned over, hands on her knees.
"What do you mean, the 'last of the Jedi?'" she asked loudly. "There are hundreds of Jedi! They can't all be…they can't all…"
"You are the last of the Jedi," Kreia repeated.
Nune hardened at this.
"I am not a Jedi," she snapped. "Not anymore."
"You were, and that is all that matters."
She opened her mouth angrily.
"Like hell that's all that matters!" she shouted, standing tall. "I was exiled! I was thrown away like a – like a bad dog! The Jedi spat at me!" Sobs escaped now, and she was obviously struggling to reel them in.
Something about them choked me.
"They threw me away! How can I be punished by both sides?"
"Exile or not, the Sith believe you to be a Jedi Knight," Kreia insisted. "And that is all that matters."
It was true. That was all that would matter to them.
Something about this snapped the resolve I had, and the anger I felt about this became instantly directed at her – unfairly, but I didn't care.
"None of that matters right this second!" I asked loudly. "What do both of you know about this ship?" I was determined to be a victim – and an angry one at that. I didn't want to talk about her being a Jedi. I didn't want to talk about Jedi at all.
"It was prominent during the Mandalorian Wars," Nune finally whispered to me, as if to shush me. Then, she turned to Kreia. "She seems to know what's going on. Why don't you stop yelling at me and ask her instead?"
"Because I feel like asking you!" I said with a pointed increase in volume. She winced, and only a small part of me felt bad.
"Fine, then I'll ask her," Nune snapped back at me. "Where was the Harbinger headed?"
"To Telos," was Kreia's answer. "It is where we must go…and where the Harbinger was bound before its unfortunate demise from the Ravager."
"So I'm not going to escape that place after all," Nune hissed, rolling her eyes. "Great. Just great."
"Hey, what are you so mad about?" I snapped at her. "A whole lot of people died on their way instead of you. Show a little respect."
So reprimanded, the hurt, just the same as it had when we'd gone into her room, flashed across her eyes. And I felt like punching myself for having caused it.
This feeling, so deflating and intense, took away my words, and I was glad when the two of them began to speak. I was excluded from the conversation, and this didn't make me unhappy. I was able to retract to think, to ponder. For so long, my indignation had been all that mattered. I felt so much self-righteousness that it seemed for me to be wrong.
Then again, I don't think I knew what was right and wrong anymore. I'd spent so many nights sleeplessly tossing in whatever bed I had to know whether or not my actions were dictated by nonsensical urges or logic. I used to live by a code. I used to be able to keep all this in.
My outbursts of anger disturbed me. The fact that I was angry with Nune disturbed me. I hadn't been angry in a very long time. I'd been mildly irritated, maybe, but never angry. Never happy. Never sad. I didn't laugh, didn't smile.
And yet, she'd already made me laugh a few times. She'd caused me to grin from ear to ear, and she sometimes made me feel physically weak or so aroused I wanted for her to leave so that I could handle it without feeling humiliated. I was not above attraction, but this felt like something different. Something scary.
It was if I was attracted to her, not just her perfect body that I ached just to touch. It was as if part of my insides relied on knowing her and being around her. The intensity of this was frightening and disturbing. But I didn't know how to stop it, and I didn't know if I even should. I was good at putting up walls, but maybe, with her, I couldn't.
Maybe it was because she didn't have the Force. Maybe that was what it was. I'd met all kinds, after all. Some with so little Force they came across as dunces and some with so much of it that it was scary just to stand next to them. Those kinds, the ones with lots of Force, they had a way about them. They knew you before you talked to them, and their eyes told you they knew it.
Made me itch.
Or maybe it was her eyes that made me feel strange, her eyes that called out to me from across galaxies with a desperation for help. I found myself empathizing with the look in her eyes, and I didn't like that. I wanted to think nothing of her. In a way, I kind of did, still. If I got a chance to leave, I knew I'd take it. I'd leap at it. Maybe I wasn't so good at knowing what I was about, but I was certainly an extremely talented survivor. I kept away from people like her.
Even if this time I felt like I'd been punched just thinking about leaving her to the fate she was obviously just learning about.
When I came back to that little ship, Kreia had gone, and Nune just stood there. Her knees buckled, and deep bags under her eyes weighed them down, urging them to sleep. Her hands shook at her sides, but beyond that she was still. Her eyes were wide, wide awake, open and terrified in a way that terrified me. She didn't understand. All movement was abandoned in favor of being able to comprehend the vastness of what had been asked of her.
Slowly, in the silence, I fought hard to remember. Kreia had told her that she needed to find the other Jedi. She was the last one, and she was the glue to put them back together.
Her eyes told me all the ways in which this was so totally unfair that it hurt inside.
I wanted to reach out to touch her, to wake her up from that small, dark corner in her mind, but my thoughts rushed back to the way she had reacted before when that woman had touched her. I didn't want such a violent reaction. I think, if I saw it again right then, the droid would have lunged at me, Kreia would have sliced me in half, and Nune would retreat even further into what was obviously senility.
I found myself wondering how long she had been alone, and then, suddenly, how old she was. If I had to guess, she looked younger than thirty. Ridiculous to think that she should be the one spearheading this movement to bring the Jedi back. There were other Jedi, older, wiser, masters. I'd met half of them, seen the other half get away. I was surprised that I didn't know of her.
Maybe I wasn't meant to. There were some Jedi from the wars that had been explicitly ignored due to their contribution to the first one. I wondered who or what she must have done to earn the complacency of the Sith or what had become the new Imperial Army. I was also afraid to know.
I found myself wanting her to be as good as she had been. I found myself aching for her to have survived all this mess. She'd briefly told me she'd fought in the Mandalorian Wars, and she'd pointedly skipped over the Jedi Civil War as if she didn't want to talk about it. I assumed this meant she was not involved, that she was guilty for having run away. I'd learned she was an Exile so far.
But I wanted more. So much more. I wanted to know her so badly that it hurt.
Finally, I couldn't take the look in her eyes anymore. I addressed her, and she jumped violently into reality, tensing for what might have been pain – and I ached. I couldn't be alone with her. Not right then. I needed my bearings, so I pushed her onto the older woman, urging her to speak with her, to check on her. I told Nune that Kreia respected her.
This seemed to shock Nune, and I felt the mean part of myself try to laugh inwardly at her stupidity.
But the larger part of me saw that she was not arrogant or preachy, was not necessarily wise or all-knowing. She was just a woman, maybe even a girl still, and she was just trying to make her life work.
Oddly, but with a world of desperate reluctance, I found myself respecting her a little bit too.
