A/N: I do not own Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic 1 or 2, or any of the characters within. Nadira Obsidian is my OC version of the Exile.
Chapter 25: Into the Void
Nadira spent a good portion of her convalescence in the cockpit or in the cargo hold practicing with her lightsaber as much as she could get away with. Which was not much, she soon discovered. The crew was watching her like a hawk, making sure she didn't overtax herself. After another set of exercises, she made her way back to the cockpit. Atton glanced over his shoulder as she entered.
"Just in time—we're almost there," he said.
Nadira nodded, swiping a stray hair out of her face before it fell back stubbornly. "How soon?"
"Any minute now."
After a few moments, they dropped out of hyperspace. As the starscape came into focus, Malachor V loomed before them. What remained of it. And that was more than enough. Malachor seemed simultaneously to fill and consume even the vacuum of space around it. The broken up planet trailed into fields of space debris, gutted and sundered starships still floating around it. The gravity wells in the system were chaotic at best, fluctuating at random. And all around the graveyard world, the pall of death blanketed everything.
Nadira gripped the pilot's chair as she swayed. Atton looked back in worry.
"Nadira, are you okay?"
"I'm okay," she gasped taking a number of deep breaths to steady herself. "I just…I can feel it from here."
Atton's eyes darkened as he watched her, but she seemed to gather herself after a minute. "You gonna be alright?"
"Yeah, I will be," she nodded slowly. But there was strength behind it. She looked at him. "I won't be facing it alone."
"No, you won't."
She managed a smile. "Then, I'll be fine."
He nodded. As they neared the planet, Nadira squeezed his shoulder before turning for the door. "I should get ready to go."
"Nadira?" Atton called, a tinge of uncertainty in his tone.
She stopped and turned back to face him.
He grappled within himself for the words to say. Seeing her so close to death on the Ravager had shaken him greatly. As he waited for her to regain consciousness, even as he'd held her on the bridge of the Sith warship, a panic had flared through him such as he'd never known in his life. He was going to lose her and she would never know the truth. Never know what he'd buried deep inside. Now they were facing not one, but two exceptionally powerful Sith Lords. He may never get another chance.
"Are you alright?" Her hand on his shoulder jarred him back to the present.
"Yeah, it's just… I need to tell you something," he began. She waited patiently, as she always did, while he searched for the courage to speak. "I couldn't say it before, but I—"
The Hawk pitched severely as a gravity well around them fluctuated. Atton barely kept the ship from plowing into a floating chunk of the planet. Nadira slammed into a wall console, splitting her brow. She regained herself though, fighting her way to the copilot's seat.
Atton cursed as he fought another flux, this time to the opposite extreme. "What is with this place?"
"It's the mass shadow generator," Nadira called. "It destroyed the planet by increasing its gravitational pull exponentially. But now it's warped the gravity in this sector."
The careening ship entered what was left of the dark planet's atmosphere, still lurching erratically. Rand grappled with the control yoke, desperately trying to keep the ship in his command. But control was ripped from the equation as they entered a narrow gorge. "Hang on!"
They nicked one wall, then carved into the other, ricocheting at an increasing speed. Then out of the haze and mist of the electrical storm loomed two pillars of rock only a handful of meters from the viewport.
Before they had a chance to brace themselves, they were catapulted forward, carried by their momentum as the ship around them lurched to a stop. Both of them crashed into the viewport, its structure already weakened by the collision and cracking under their weight. Atton glanced up just in time to see the cracks stretching to cut a webbed design, widening by the second. He reached out to Nadira, but the transparisteel gave out beneath them. All they saw before the darkness claimed them was the sight of the Ebon Hawk driven at a steep angle between the stone walls above them before it vanished in the thickening mists.