A/N: Ok, it's midterms week(s), so clearly the right thing to do is write fanfic instead of studying.

Uh. Yeah.

This chapter was a bit rushed (I wrote most of it during my econ review session) so if there are any typos or whatever tell me and I'll fix them; enjoy this special installation of Author Procrastinates by Writing Fanfic.

Please review, as it would go a long, long way to making me feel less guilty when I fail all my exams.

"You're upset," Carra remarked.

Atton scowled at her over the top of his pazaak hand. "I'm not upset," he snapped.

She peered at his cards. "Are you playing pazaak with yourself?"

"Yeah. And?"

"Nothing," Carra said, a bit too hastily.

Atton sighed and gathered up his cards. "What do you want? Because, you know, unless you want this ship to go somewhere, or you need me to shoot something, I'm sure there's a certain blond in the medbay who wants to talk to you."

"You are upset," she said. "Do you want to shoot something? Because we still haven't gone to the kinrath cave—"

"Great," Atton said bitterly. "Killing kinraths. That'd be really fun. I mean, obviously it can't compare to crawling through ruins fighting off the laigreks, but I suppose I'll take what I can get—"

"I think Vrook's there," Carra added, and Atton rolled his eyes. More Jedi. As though two—and a half, if you counted Mical—weren't enough. He'd only spent the past few years trying to run away from them.

"If you need me along, I'll come," Atton said grudgingly.

Carra sighed. "Come on, Atton, you might as well tell me. I'll figure it out eventually."

Atton huffed in exasperation. "Fine. I'm upset because Mical is a stuck-up, self-righteous, sanctimonious prude! I can't believe you invited him along."

"What did he do?"

"Let's see," Atton said, ticking things off on his fingers. "He's informed me that I was not to entertain lewd thoughts of you. He's tried to get me to give up drinking. He's got stupid hair, and no sense of humor, and talks like he's in an archaic holovid—"

Carra had, for some reason, started laughing. "You just have to tell the right jokes," she said. "But really, he's not so bad—"

Well, Mical certainly wasn't as bad as Kreia, but for some reason he annoyed Atton more. "Why couldn't you stick to nice guys like Bao-Dur?" Atton grumbled.

"Because I wouldn't want to throw you out of the airlock," Carra said. She reached out and touched his shoulder. "Do you want to come? You don't have to."

Atton sighed. "Yeah, I'll come."

--

He had had nightmares again the night before; there had been fire and desperate screaming, and Atton hadn't been exactly sure what he'd been dreaming about, but at any rate it hadn't been pleasant; he wished, bitterly, that he had never come to Dantooine.

And he had forgotten what it was like to be out on the plains proper, with the wind singing through the grass and the vast empty sky above him—it hurt, and Atton shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and gritted his teeth and kept on walking. She had never said hearing the Force would be a painful thing. She had never told him that she would haunt him through it. Why Dantooine, anyway? There wasn't anything particularly special about the planet, it was just grass and kath hounds and a few derelict farmhouses—

"Atton?" That would be Carra. "Are you all right?"

"Fine," he said.

Couldn't she feel it? She was a Jedi, wasn't she? Why didn't it hurt her to walk through the plains?

Maybe, Atton thought, it was different for Jedi. He snorted to himself. Maybe they were special.

Her eyes had been dark, dark, dark, like the space between the stars, and he couldn't even remember now how he had killed her, only the way she had looked at him as she died.

Frack. He hated this place.

Carra's hand was on his elbow. The echoing pain ebbed a bit, and he glanced down at her. "What?"

She was carefully not looking at him. "You don't like this place."

"No kidding," he snapped.

Her grip tightened. "You wouldn't want to tell me why, would you?"

"You want to tell me why you got exiled?"

"I followed Revan into the Mandalorian wars," Carra said. "She made me a General. I—I knew what we had to do to win." She sighed. "But it got a lot of people killed. So the Council exiled me for it—I suppose it was Malachor, really—"

"You were the general who ordered the destruction of Malachor V?" Atton demanded.

"Yes," Carra said. She looked up at him, that shadow in her eyes, and said, very seriously, "It hurt when Malachor died, Atton. And then I couldn't feel the Force anymore."

"Frack, Carra, I wasn't expecting you to actually tell me."

He hadn't know she was behind Malachor.

Carra shrugged. "You wanted to know," she said. "And I trust you."

Why? He would only betray her, as he'd betrayed every cause he'd served. But, Atton supposed, Carra didn't know that.

She had destroyed a planet.

He had only killed a handful of Jedi. Atton snorted. For some reason the thought did not cheer him up. "Where's this cave, anyway?" he asked.

"Close," Carra said, and they didn't speak the rest of the short walk there.

She only let go of him once they were in the cave, but underground he couldn't hear the wind sighing at him, and it didn't hurt to breathe; the place was dark and dank and crawling with kinrath, but Carra seemed to know where she was going, so he followed her down the twisting dark tunnels and shot at anything that moved. Carra, with her vibroblades, was soon splattered with kinrath blood, and bleeding from half a dozen scratches—Mical, Atton thought uncharitably, would probably be more than happy to help patch her up. He wondered why she didn't simply heal herself. It was probably another Jedi thing.

They moved on, and soon the walls started glowing; Carra pointed to the crystals growing from the stone, and said, "We used to harvest our lightsaber crystals from this cave."

"The Jedi Enclave?"

"Yes," she said, and stopped to look at a glowing shard. The green crystal cast an eerie glow on her face. For a moment she looked thoughtful.

Then she smiled. "I'm a Jedi, aren't I?"

"Uh," Atton said. "Is that a trick question? Because, you know, normally I'd say yes, but—"

"Let's go," Carra said, as though she hadn't been listening to a word he'd said. Atton rolled his eyes. How could she not be a Jedi? She was so bloody cryptic sometimes.

They went through the caves, and slowly the number of kinrath they came across diminished; the caves were getting wider now, the crystal formations more fantastical. The singing hard started up again—a curve of music just at the edge of his hearing, bright and clear and lovely, and Atton discovered that he was getting a headache.

"What are we even looking for?" he demanded, and Carra said, very succinctly, "Vrook," but they were clearly going in the wrong direction.

He couldn't enter the last chamber with her; his head was pounding, and he claimed exhaustion as he leaned against the rocky stone wall and watched her enter the cave alone; the glow of hundreds of thousands of crystals were coming from the cavern, and the singing was sharp and bright against his mind. Carra came out a little while later, looking thoughtful.

There hadn't been any kinrath in there, Atton knew.

They moved back out into the tunnels. Soon the singing faded, and his headache disappeared; Atton wondered what it was about Dantooine that made him so miserable. It was like the entire bloody planet was some sort of magnifier for the Force. How could Jedi talk about opening themselves up to it when there merest contact hurt?

Clearly, they were all insane.

When they finally found Vrook they didn't so much see him as nearly trip over the mercenary camp holding him captive. Atton only barely stopped brooding in time to notice that there was a group of heavily armed humans up ahead; Carra didn't notice, and kept on walking. He grabbed the back of her shirt and hauled her to a stop. "Mercs," he hissed in her ear.

She craned her neck. "Vrook's there," she whispered back, and Atton grimaced.

"Don't just go charging in there," he said quietly, tugging her back. "There's loads of them. We'll get slaughtered."

Footsteps. A guard was coming toward them; Atton swore silently to himself and pulled them both into a crevice in the rock wall. Carra, pressed up against his shoulder, made a sound of protest as he hauled her against him; he clapped a hand over her mouth.

The guard paused, just a few feet away, and cocked his head as though he were trying to hear something. The edge of the pool of light was just a little ways away and Atton hoped, desperately, that the guard couldn't make out their shadows against the rock.

After a moment the guard shrugged and moved on. Atton grabbed Carra's arm and pulled her away, back down the dark tunnel, and didn't stop until they were well out of earshot of the camp.

"We have to get Vrook out," Carra was protesting. "Didn't you see him? He was in a force field—"

"To hell with Vrook," Atton said, frustrated. "I'm not going to let you risk getting yourself killed over this. He's a Jedi, he can stay alive until we come back with some militia."

"They might kill him before then!"

Atton crossed his arms and glowered at her, an effort which was, unfortunately, mostly lost in the darkness. "They might kill you," he snapped.

Her hand was on his arm. "Are you worried about me, Atton?"

"Carra," Atton bit out, "now is not the time to explore my feelings. Now is the time to get the hell out of here."

"I'll just talk to them," she said.

"And they'll shoot you on sight. Don't be an idiot, we're leaving—"

Even in the dimness there was no mistaking the stubborn tilt of her jaw.

He growled in frustration and briefly contemplated picking her up and forcibly carrying her away. No, that probably wouldn't work; he'd seen her in action, and she could knock him flat on his back in a close-up fight. "If those mercs don't kill you," Atton said, "I will. All right, fine. If I wind up dead, I hope you'll feel guilty."

"Atton—"

But he was already stalking back up the tunnel toward the camp. "Stay hidden until I give you the signal," he snapped.

"What signal?" Carra wanted to know.

"You'll know it when you see it," Atton said, and flicked on his stealth generator.

She stopped at the edge of the lights of the camp, but Atton kept walking, sticking to the edges of the cavern and moving as silently as he could; Vrook, in his force field cage at the other end of the camp, was looking irritated and impatient, and Atton was quite certain that he could tell they were there. Vrook probably wouldn't even thank them, Atton thought bitterly. Jedi. When was he ever going to get away from them?

He crept up behind the mercenary captain and locked his arm around the man's throat. His stealth generator flickered off; in a flash his other hand was holding a blaster to the captain's head.

"Move, and he gets it," Atton announced pleasantly to the stunned band of mercenaries.

--

He was right. Vrook didn't thank them. Instead, he chewed them out for being—what was it, "hot-headed young fools"?

Yeah, probably close enough.

After he was gone, Atton leaned against the rocky wall at the mouth of the kinrath cave and glared at Carra. "I told you we shouldn't have rescued him," he snapped.

Carra, who was looking in the direction that Vrook had gone, sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. "He's always like that—I should've warned you."

"No, you should've listened to me and left when I said we should—"

But Carra was shaking her head. "We couldn't have," she said. She looked up at him. "Thank you," she added. "For helping. How did you know kidnapping the captain would work?"

They'd let the captain go a few tunnels back; he'd snarled and promised to wreak revenge on them all before running away. Atton shrugged. "Why do you think merc bands stick together even when they're out of work?" he asked. "It's the captain. A good captain keeps his band together." No matter what. Atton snorted. "Though it was quite possible that the mercs wouldn't have cared if I'd shot him, and then we'd have been in trouble."

"Was that likely?"

Atton scowled. "More likely than I would have liked."

"Well," Carra said, sounding remarkably cheerful for someone who had only barely managed to escape a blaster shot through the head, "we'd best get going. Vrook will probably want to talk to us back at the compound."

"You're going back to talk to Vrook?" Atton demanded. "Why the hell would you want to do that? He didn't even thank us. And you're bleeding."

She blinked at him. "Not very much."

Jedi. It was a wonder there were any left; they had the survival instincts of a suicidal gizka. Furious, Atton snapped, "Fine," and stalked off into the plains.

His anger, at least, made it harder to hear the Force—or at least, it drowned it out—and Atton kicked viciously at a tuft of grass and wished he had a glass of juma. Frack, he probably needed a whole bottle. Was she trying to get herself killed? Because she was making some damned fine attempts, from what he could see, and it hurt when he thought of her dying, and Atton was sure that it wasn't just about Carra, but he was also quite, quite positive that he didn't care—

"Atton, listen—"

"Stow it, Carra," he snapped, and thought of how furious he was and how much he hated the Jedi; anything but that misery that was threatening the edges of his mind. "Tell it to Vrook. If you want to get yourself killed, that's fine by me—" (it wasn't, it wasn't) "—but leave me out of it next time, all right?"

He could feel her looking at him, but Atton scowled and kept his eyes straight ahead and kept walking; after a moment he heard her sigh. He felt her fingers brush against the back of his hand and curl around his wrist; the sharp edge of the pain faded, and Atton looked across the plains and wondered, briefly, if he would have found the prairie beautiful if it didn't hurt to look at it.

They walked, not speaking, and not quite holding hands, all the way back to the Hawk, where Carra let Mical slather kolto on her cuts.