Hey, friends/readers! I'm very sorry this has taken so long. I'm a little stuck here, so maybe the feeling is that the story is dragging, but I know I can get out of the rut (at some point.)

Full disclosure: I lost about 3 - 4 chapters! I was uploading while my computer died, and, while I normally don't edit in the composition box found within the Fanfiction site, I had been doing that this time in multiple tabs. Serves me right for doing something so dumb! Therefore, I've lost a lot of content. Frustration! I'm trying to rewrite that which I had written, but there are those of you out there who know, I'm sure, how much less you enjoy both writing and reading the replaced versions of things you've already written. Even if it is good in its own right, it's not that same, first, finished, polished thing that you wanted! (Not that anybody's perfect. I continue to find typos in my stuff all the time.)

Anyways, thanks for keeping up with me. I sincerely appreciate all the support. I've done my best to make up for the loss here, but I can always improve. So, if I've dishonored the material, or the universe, or the prose, or the characters, let me know (kindly) and I will do my best to keep up! *Phew*

When I woke up, everything washed over me in a way it had not in a long time. It was like the worst hangover of your life. It left something stale clinging to the back of your teeth, making your tongue feel swollen, too big for you to swallow, and the nasty chemicals gave it an almost itchy, fuzzy quality. This made it hard to breathe, and you had to wake up just to latch onto oxygen, which only moments later you immediately regretted.

Because there was unimaginable shame.

That always came next.

Shame.

And it was shame I couldn't hide from. Not in those horrible, awful moments between being asleep and being awake in which nobody could lie to themselves.

I was a murderer and a liar and a cheat. I was a pirate and a scoundrel, a smuggler and a womanizer. I was a drunkard and a thief, but, most of all, I was stupid. More than stupid. I was foolish.

It washed over me as I remembered my conversation with Kreia and I began to forget why it was I'd been so cavalier these last few weeks. A cold sweat pierced the back of my neck, and the air around me was chilly enough to make this sensation remarkably unpleasant. I felt sick and depressed. I didn't want to move. What was the point? If I died here in this ice hole, nobody would care. And that way I'd get out of serving Neli and Kreia and leave it all behind. I could just leave it all behind.

At least, that was what I thought before a slight pressure changed on the bed I was in, and my eyes shot open – more out of instinct than desire to see who it was.

And there she was.

Nuneli Hyrra, War Hero. General.

Woman.

Friend.

Smiling down at me as if I'd just been born with so much warmth in the gentle crinkles in the gaze of her beautiful earthy eyes that the frigid temperature of the air rose twenty degrees.

I felt so vulnerable suddenly as my breath left my body, as my jaw slackened, as my eyes clung, terrified to lose her, solidly to hers. All that I was cycled through my head between my ears like a buzz, like a reminder, and, despite what she made me feel, I looked down at my hands.

These long, still moments were hard for me. I wanted something quick, something fleeting. I didn't like this. I didn't enjoy it, mostly because I didn't know how to handle it. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to change when I'd done so much to be inconstant?

I had to, for her sake. So that she would never know about me. I absolutely had to figure it out, as unpleasant as it was.

But, in small steps. Some habits would be harder to break.

Like my reaction to being woken up.

Her presence had caused me to shoot away from her. I'd recoiled abruptly into a cool metal wall on the far side of the bed, and I found myself lingering as close to it as I could to be further away from her.

I clenched my eyes shut for a moment, wishing away my idiocy, but she didn't seem to notice. At least, I saw her smile with a little too much force and pretend not to notice. And the faded mirth in her eyes didn't feel good either.

She thought I was reacting to her.

She carried so much shame too, but it seemed almost like some backlight was projecting it outwards now. Whatever this place was, whoever the Jedi was she'd spoken to, I could see that it ate at her.

But I had not to notice this. I had to act as if nothing had changed.

Nothing had, really. Just my motivations were different.

"Hey, there, gorgeous," I muttered groggily.

"Don't," she muttered back, clearing her throat uncomfortably.

Her beautiful brown eyes had landed on her lap, and she scooted away as far as was reasonable to create space between us.

Say something, idiot! I thought frantically.

Quick, impulsive words were all I had to go on because my mind was still stuck in that time-freezing gaze she'd locked me in earlier.

"Hey…" I said, my voice cracking.

I cleared it sheepishly, glancing around at everything but always eventually settling back on her. She just listened patiently, eyes unmovably centered on her lap now.

"You're back with us," I continued.

She didn't smile anymore, and that made me feel very deflated.

"I am," she whispered, looking at her hands.

"We were just on our way to rescue you from those ghost women, when…uh…we got locked up."

She glanced over at me, and a hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, at her cheeks as her eyes twinkled behind that now-shadow of mirth.

"I was with you, remember?" she asked, looking at me with a hint of…something.

She was probably mocking me.

I swore in my head, wishing I wasn't such a complete idiot.

She seemed to be struggling to say something, which wasn't news. I'd also learned that she was slow with people. She was impulsive and hot-tempered, but she tried to think before she spoke. She was stuck in her head, just the way I used to be.

Maybe that was why I waited so long whenever she tried to speak. I waited patiently like I had with no one else.

"Are you okay?" she finally managed, glancing at me sideways with a nervous tightening in her mouth.

Every time she asked it, it made me think of her.

Her eyes were swollen. She'd been crying. Her cheeks looked puffy, and, as if on cue, she sniffled just once, as if to stifle the results of a long sob I'd somehow unwittingly missed. It made me feel very uncomfortable, both her crying and how it made me feel. I tried to swallow. It, too, was hard, but I managed.

"I'm…I'm fine," I managed, none too smoothly. "Don't bother worrying about me. You?"

She just nodded, pursing her lips.

"I met a Jedi friend from my childhood here," she whispered eventually, glancing at me again the same way I glanced at her.

The word "Jedi" rang in my head too loudly for me to really listen closely.

But I managed to say,

"Uh oh. Watch out."

"Mhmm," she said tensely. "And…"

She sat tall suddenly, as if it pained her.

"She has not forgiven me."

It was a simple statement. A basic sentence. It shouldn't have surprised me or floored me, but it did. Rage boiled inside of me as I wondered who this pretender was for me to kill. And I would kill her for making my Neli look like that, sound like that.

My Neli, my head repeated mockingly.

I scowled internally, trying to focus my self-loathing into my rage.

It worked.

"Who the hell is she to judge you?" I asked.

Neli shrugged, shaking her head. She'd turned her head away. She didn't want me to look at her.

"She was my friend for a long time," she confided in me.

Gems, each and every memory she let me have. They were little treasures, all of them, and I was enraptured as she continued.

"I didn't have very many friends."

"Why the hell not?" I asked her. "You don't drink, you don't laugh, you're not fun. What's not to like about that if you're a Jedi?"

Ouch, I thought after a moment.

She looked upset.

"Maybe, uh...maybe that was too harsh," I tried to amend, but she just made a noise to stop me.

"You know, this is exactly why I knew I shouldn't have come to you!" she finally snapped. "You're always making fun of me!"

"Hey, princess, nobody asked you to come talk to me," I admonished with a convincing amount of swagger.

Made me feel sick.

"I'm not 'fun?'" she shouted, standing away from the bed.

She flipped back around to face me.

"Is that what you think you're doing at those clubs? With those people? Having fun? Is that what you think we're here to do? To have fun?"

"No, it seems like we're here to mope around and cry all the time! Isn't that right?"

"Screw you!" she snapped. "I didn't ask for your help!"

"Well, I didn't ask to be here either!"

"Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself, Atton, it really isn't becoming of a man your age."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I mean you better watch out! Your self-pity is showing!"

"Oh, I'm sorry," I snapped, "are you going to tell me how I'm feeling now?"

I raised my hands and motioned for her to sit back down, sarcastically welcoming her back to the bed. Anger pulsed through me, and I couldn't help it.

Hearing her mock me was too much.

"You think - you think I want to be here? To be like this? You think I've always been this way?"

"Haven't you? Little bundle of joy that you are. Tell me, do you ever relax or would that send you into t a downward spiral?"

"Well, I thought we had had some fun!" she tried, obviously trying to dial it down.

But she'd already gone too far. I would have none of it. Like a buzz, the words came flying out of my mouth before I could stop them.

"As if trailing behind a piece of ass like you, a senile old woman, and an obviously dysfunctional, overly-loyal war veteran has even been remotely close to fun!"

She didn't say anything now, just stared, eyes wide, but I didn't care.

"You said it yourself; she hasn't forgiven you," I snapped cruelly. "Why do you think that might be, hm? You're not exactly the biggest bucket of rainbows and flowers that most Jedi are. What was it that pissed off your old pal? Your pessimism or your complete and total inability to take care of yourself and everyone else?"

Thwack!

She'd slapped me and, like I had been in a dream, I just blinked, feeling ashamed even more than I had before. I couldn't look at her. Then, I expected fire. A rain of fire.

But she didn't. She just breathed in and out, in and out, in and out, as if her breathing at all was an affirmation of how unkind I'd just been. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn't.

"People don't like me," she finally whispered, scowling. "And that's fine. But I do not need to be reminded of that fact when everybody around me has made that abundantly clear - alright?"

I just nodded now. I couldn't speak.

Because I disagreed. Beneath her obviously damaged outer shell, I thought I saw the remnants of somebody pretty fun underneath it all. Down there somewhere, I saw the makings of somebody who'd be popular to all the right people – she was witty, smart, intelligent, more gorgeous than a Hutt's slave. She had attitude and she was lippy, but that only heightened the desire and the appeal.

My eyes roved all over her. There was defeat in everything her body said to me. It was unkind of me to kick her when she was down, even for me.

"It's…hard…" she managed. "To be by yourself. That's hard. And if you knew anything about that, you'd leave me alone. I'm doing the best I can with what I know."

Empathy, sweet, pungent empathy, overwhelmed me in a way that it had not in many long years.

"As for my friend, she was resentful of me because I gave up my spot to be a Padawan to a Council member to join the war."

"The Council?" I repeated dumbly.

I knew about the Council. We'd mocked the Council. I'd hated the Council. We plotted to kill them. In some outposts, there were Council member posters full of knife holes or burnt by blaster fire, usually between the eyes.

A chill settled in my gut that it could have been her.

"The Grandmaster of our Council on Dantooine – he never liked me. He made me run extra exercises and when the other Padawans would go out to finish their training in the fields, I had to stay in the yard, learning discipline. I've always lacked form, he said."

She snorted in a way that was telling.

And I could just see that scene, Neli breaking her back over some move or other, watching wistfully as the other kids jogged happily out into the open to go do who knows what on Dantooine. She was trapped in a cage that way.

It dawned on me that maybe really she was like this not just because of her isolation in Exile but also because of her whole life. It wasn't because she wasn't fun. It was because she had been rejected by everybody for her whole life.

How lonely that must have been.

It pained me, and I didn't like it.

"Anyway," she said with too much dismissiveness. "Maybe you're right. Jedi are cowards and hypocrites."

She shrugged, and I realized now that tears were streaking her cheeks.

"Including me," she finally added, staring at her hands.

Shame. That was this feeling. Shame that one of the huge reasons her masters were treating her this way was because she'd left the only home that she had ever known to fight scum like me. Of course, we hadn't started out as scum. She'd come to help me. But when I'd changed, she'd stayed the same, and they'd kicked her in the ribs for it.

I looked away, feeling disgusted with myself.

I wondered if I could leave, how that would be, what that would be like.

But then I thought of the look on her face. Of how broken it would make her.

But then, maybe I was flattering myself. We weren't really friends. Right? Or were we? Did she think of me as her friend? I thought of her as my friend. The term "friend" could be thrown around so casually these days, but she wasn't someone I'd meet again via the business end of a blaster. She'd probably at least smile and wave.

I hoped so.

"I didn't come here to lecture you," she said, shaking her head as tears threatened to spill.

"Why did you come here then?" I managed coolly.

"To see if you were okay," she said, wiping her tears quickly, as if abandoning all pretense.

She glanced at me, laughing bitterly, and I didn't have the willpower to swat this down like I usually did. Instead, my breathing became labored again as sensations overtook my body. It was in that moment that I learned one very important thing:

I could never leave.

Another kind of helplessness trapped me here, and I hated everything all in a moment. Everything except for her, the blissful, ignorant victim who everybody insulted by assuming she just didn't know any better.

"Why were you even unconscious?" she asked me suspiciously after a while.

The alarm bells went off, and I knew this would be the start of it all. The first lie that would give birth to so many others.

"I don't know," I lied masterfully. "Guess the being thrown in jail repeatedly has really been getting to me."

She turned to evaluate me, her eyes just slightly too perceptive to accept this at face value. But then, as usual, she allowed the moment to pass out of something I'd come to recognize as complacency.

There was a painful silence in the room.

"I'm going to go, uh…have a look around," she announced awkwardly. "We're stuck here until the storm passes. They've given us free reign, but…I mean, be gentle with those women. They're…interesting."

I couldn't say anything else. I just felt awfully out of place.

Why had I just been so mean?

Nodding, feeling so foolish I was ashamed, I watched her leave the room, and I glanced around quickly. It was sparse and made of a combination of stone and metal. No decorations. No windows. Just beds and lighting.

Swearing at myself, I fell back, running my hands through my hair, ready to waste the day away feeling sorry for myself.