Chapter Twenty-Six: Awakening
Get up. Get dressed. Try not to overstretch arm in cast. Collect things from guest quarters. "Eli, did you pack the trunk with your tunics already? I've got another cloak to…"
Eat breakfast. Meet with Queen. Avoid Orion's gaze, though the taste of his lips still lingers. "By the powers vested in me by the people of Naboo, I, Queen Kadela Amanarrel, award you this medal in recognition of your service…"
Pack freighter. Wait for Masters. Talk with handmaidens. "Is Dantooine nice? I've never been…"
Board ship. Wave goodbye. Fake a yawn, retire to sleeping cabin, curl up on a bunk as the ship rumbles to life. Shut eyes, replay last night. Ship lurches, stabilizers kick in. It was a kiss. Just a kiss.
There is no emotion.
Then what was the warmth that spread through her like honey when his grin passed her way?
There is peace.
There is no passion.
What was the longing that urged her to hold him, to brush her fingers through his hair?
There is serenity.
There is no chaos.
What was the turmoil that gripped her heart and made her afraid that last night was all a dream? That the Masters would read the guilt on her face and tear the two of them apart?
There is harmony.
Was there?
"Eli. Eliatra, wake up. We're home."
A cool hand brushed her sleep-tousled hair away from her forehead, but it was only Austrina's eyes that met her own gaze.
"How are you feeling?" The Jedi Master offered a hand to help her padawan to her feet, standing back as she stretched carefully.
"Tired. Sore." Eli paused to consider. "Still in one piece."
Austrina smiled as the two headed out of the bunkroom. "Orion and Master Khvee already started unloading our things. I think we'd better get you to the infirmary to see if they can do anything more for your arm."
Though it was barely dawn on Dantooine, Jedi were already bustling about, barely giving a second glance to the pair as they descended from the docking bay into the lower levels of the academy. Eli shivered in the crisp morning air and pulled her cloak further around her shoulders, wincing as it chafed the still-sore areas around her throat. Other padawans nodded hello as she passed them, eyes lingering on her bandaged arm.
The healers at the infirmary had seen worse, of course, but still clucked disapprovingly when she disrobed to reveal the numerous other burns and cuts across her skin besides the still-healing bone in her arm. They worked busily around her, spreading kolto on some wounds and re-dressing others, warning her it might hurt. She felt nothing.
Couldn't bear the thought of losing you… if you had died…
"Did they do anything else to you, Padawan? Anything we… can't see? Padawan…"
If I had lost you…
"I'll talk to her later. Thank you, Master Veraque. I'll take her back to her quarters."
Austrina's arm was warm and strong around her shoulders, cautious of the wounds beneath the loose white robes they'd given her. They moved in silence toward the dormitories, through crowds of padawans and younglings heading to their morning training sessions.
"You're brave, Eli. A Knight might have failed in your position."
"I did fail, Master." She looked up, speaking aloud for the first time since leaving the ship. "I didn't stop the Medellas. I couldn't do a thing to protect the Queen." Bitterness crept into her voice. "Once they captured us, we were separated. They… they might have killed her, and I wouldn't have even been there to stop it."
"Eliatra." Austrina stopped and turned to face her, hands on her shoulders. "What happened on that platform, at the ceremony? Before the Medellas ship came?"
She thought back what felt like years. The heat, the crowds, lifting the crown high into the air, the glittering edge of the blade—"The handmaiden. She tried to kill Kadela. And she—she was the one who tried to shoot at us in the ballroom." She couldn't have been planted by Altus, because she clearly had wanted the Queen dead—the intent in that dagger was unmistakable. "Was it the Kharryaksri?"
"That's what Captain Samarn thought, when we talked to him before we left," Austrina said. "You stopped her from killing Kadela. If you hadn't been there, the whole mission would have been a waste."
"And the Sith," Eli remembered. "The one who…" She stopped, swallowing hard as echoes of his mental torture rippled across her skull. Austrina swiftly pulled her into a hug.
"Hush, Padawan. I just wanted you to know that you did not fail. Not by any measure."
They returned to Eli's dorm and Austrina helped her into bed with promises of breakfast soon to come. The door shut softly, leaving the padawan to stare mutely at the window opposite her bed. Soft rose light crept across the ceiling but did little to warm the chill that had wrapped itself around her. Her mind persisted in chewing over every facet of the last few days, though her body ached for rest. She eventually lapsed into a troubled sleep, brow still furrowed in unconscious worry.
When she finally woke, a tray of juice, lukewarm cereal, and a half-eaten berry pastry on a tray met her blurry eyes. Finding her legs cramped and drawn up beneath her, she moved to stretch them out and found the end of her bed considerably shorter than usual. A faint snore indicated the reason as she sat up to see a certain lanky teenager draped across the foot of her mattress.
He was peaceful, even endearing, his Adam's apple bobbing as he drew another slow breath. Gone was the intensity that had etched itself across his face the night before. In the cool white silence of her academy dormitory, it was hard to believe that they were anything but the inseparable friends—only friends—they had always been.
Eliatra had never wanted to be so close, yet so far away from him. Running away and kissing him again both seemed equally viable options.
Without really thinking about it, she slipped a lightly bandaged hand beneath Orion's palm, lacing her fingers between his and tracing a rough knuckle with her thumb.
The slight movement stirred him from sleep, his hand reflexively closing on hers, then relaxing, then closing again as he focused ocean-blue eyes on her face. "Eli."
"Didn't Austrina tell you to let me sleep?" She smiled slightly in mock reproach.
He sat up, pulling up a knee to face her on the bed. "She might have, if she'd seen me sneaking in here." His cheeky smile faded slightly as he glanced down at their clasped hands, then back up. His gaze lingered a moment on the collar of blotchy puce bruises forming around her neck before returning to her eyes. "Eli," he said again, "I just, uh… I came to say I'm sorry. About last night."
Eliatra flushed, the kiss coming back in a rush; it had been interrupted by their masters entering the room before much could come of it. He searched her face for acceptance and tentatively reached to brush her tousled hair out of her eyes. The combined emotional weight of the last few days came crashing down on her shoulders all at once and she shut her eyes, drawing a breath at the vertigo.
"Come here," she whispered.
Obligingly he rose and moved to the head of her bed, fluffing her pillow and leaning back against the headboard behind her. Eliatra let him fold his arms around her shoulders and pressed her chin into the soft fabric of his tunic sleeves.
"You don't have to apologize," she murmured finally. His heart beat softly behind her, a steadier echo of her own fluttering pulse.
"No?" His lips pressed into her hair and she allowed herself a smile as he inhaled deeply. "I didn't want you to be mad or… or to stop being my friend. For a minute everything was perfect, and then…"
"Then what?"
"Then I was afraid I'd lost you. Again."
"Orion…"
"Hmm."
"We can't do this. The Jedi… they'll never stand for it. You know the Code. The risks."
He shifted into a more comfortable position behind her and she could almost feel his stubborn frown. "And why can't we? You can't take the Code at face value anyway. If we really didn't have any emotion, we'd be a bunch of droids, wouldn't we? And it's not like we have to announce this to the world. Uh, whatever 'this' is." Doubt momentarily filtered into his voice, and he reached for the breakfast tray in an attempt to change the subject. "Scone?"
"Why didn't you finish it?" She eyed the bite taken out of the pastry and sampled a bit of the jam filling. "I thought you liked this kind."
"Too much jelly. Reminds me of… uh, never mind."
Momentarily derailed by attempting to remember which of his recent pranks involved jam, she mused for a moment before remembering their original subject. "What about when I was captured? What if that happens again and you have to choose between saving me or some innocent civilian? Or a whole city? Other Jedi have to be able to trust that you'll do the right thing."
"Eli." He paused, mulling over his next words before continuing, "What do you want from this? From me?"
"The Jedi—"
"I'm not talking about the Jedi. I'm talking about you." His arms shifted, hands clasping gently over her heart. "What do you feel?"
Eliatra opened her mouth to reply, then stopped, realizing that she had no words. There was nothing to hide behind, nothing to disguise the little inner voice that always lurked behind her brave façade.
"Afraid," she whispered at last. "Lonely. Overwhelmed." The words felt strange on her tongue, but the moment she said them, she knew they were truths she had been denying. "I'm scared that I can't do this by myself."
Orion stayed silent for a long moment, then lifted his face from her hair and moved his lips to her ear, his breath tickling the short hair by her cheeks. "Then let me help you. I want to be here for you, Eli. Always." He squeezed her gently, minding the bruises at her throat, and brushed his lips against her cheek when she turned to see him out of her peripheral.
"Always is a long time," she whispered. "Are you sure you want to do that?"
He didn't hesitate this time. "Yes."
*****
Eliatra was feeling well enough to go to dinner that evening, and after a little time to herself to freshen up and dress in a way that didn't highlight her various wounds, she made an appearance in the dining hall only to be swamped by a hug moments later.
"Eli! Austrina wouldn't let me see you and Orion just said you were pretty badly banged up and no one else was saying anything but here you are!" Trisana spoke so quickly Eli could barely understand her as she fluttered about, taking inventory of every visible scrape and burn.
The weary padawan held up her hands with a weak grin in an attempt to still Tris's worrying. "Relax, Tris, I'm fine, I just… want to get something to eat." She trailed off as she scanned the crowd for the familiar mop of jet-black hair.
"Right, of course. Come on, I'll help you." Tris seized her hand and led her to the food counter as though she was showing around a new padawan. "It's been so dull here you'd never believe… though there's been a lot of talk of the Mandalorian attacks on the Outer Rim, and a lot of Jedi muttering about how we should do something about it…" She busily piled an assortment of dinner items on the tray as Eliatra glanced back over the rows of tables again, eyes finally catching on a hand waving her way.
"And you guys got to socialize with the queen and fight Sith and… was it true, what Orion told me about the awards? Because I figured he was joking, since they definitely wouldn't have let him head his own search patrol for you and the Queen…"
Eliatra followed her friend to Orion's table, passively muttering affirmations to seem like she was paying attention. What would he do in public? Would he let on what had passed between them in her room?
Tris plunked herself down squarely beside Orion and left the seat on her opposite side open to Eli, leaving her to wave a greeting to him before being besieged by a new set of questions. Orion interjected the usual exaggerations in their conversation, doing his best to appear the brave hero while Eliatra corrected with her side of the story.
"Okay, maybe I didn't head up a whole squadron of fighters in the rescue effort," he conceded at one point when Eli pointed out his singular aloneness when he'd appeared at the base, "but I was the one who found you and Kadela. If I hadn't left when I did, or gotten there when I did…" he trailed off, swallowing as an uncharacteristically somber look flickered over his features.
"But how did you find them?" Tris pressed, missing his frown as he turned back to his plate.
"I looked," he said guardedly, meeting Eliatra's gaze.
"He used the Force," she said, not looking away, "even though I had the neural inhibitors on. I couldn't feel the Force, but you… you could feel me." She frowned at him. "Why couldn't Austrina?"
Tris remained silent for once, staring back and forth between the two of them.
"I don't know," Orion said slowly, rubbing the back of his neck. "They said you were too far away. But I was in Theed, too. I just… reached out, I guess."
"And you could 'reach' farther than a Jedi Master?" Tris asked skeptically.
"Don't ask me to explain it," Orion scowled, then softened. "Sorry. I just… it's been a long few days."
Tris patted his back consolingly. "Don't worry about it. Let me tell you all the news that we've had while you were gone…"
Eliatra focused on her dinner and her inner dialogue as the other padawans chatted. Now that she thought about it, she had always been somewhat close to Orion. Masters and padawans usually formed bonds of some sort, so it wasn't surprising that two friends could also bond in a similar fashion. But enough that he could sense her at such a far distance that she was even beyond her Master's reach? Was it all simply because of the way he felt about her?
The questions threatened to make her head pound again, and that thought made her remember the Sith that had reached steely fingers into her mind and wrenched out her memories. Suddenly sick to her stomach, she pushed her plate away and excused herself, claiming tiredness and making her way out of the dining hall before Tris could stop her.
Her feet carried her to the cool gardens outside the academy, their light scent refreshing in the evening. The first stars were beginning to wink into existence above her and she finally collapsed onto a stone bench beside a fountain, shutting her eyes to everything: the Queen, the Sith, the bloodshed, the sacrifice… so much death had happened these last few days, much of it by her own hands. She opened her eyes again and found Orion's blue ones replacing the stars above.
"I had to lose Tris," he said apologetically. "What happened?"
She released a sigh and frowned hopelessly up at him. "Everything."
"C'mere." He motioned for her to sit up and sat down behind her, letting her lay her head back in his lap. "You have to let it go," he said softly.
"It's never going to get better," she said, focusing on the distant silver specks above them. "People are always going to have to die around us, even if it's not directly by our hands. And you and I—we're not even supposed to be dealing with it like this." She let a rough laugh escape her throat. "If the Masters had their way, we'd be having a frank discussion over… over meditation, or something. It's all so detached. How can they just let all this happen and move on?"
"I think it's the only way they can," he said softly. "If you get too involved, it can take hold of you… change you into something else. But this, this isn't bad. Is it?" He brushed her cheek, making her shift to look up at him. "This is how we can survive. Together."
"But how can we if everyone is against us?" she whispered.
"Because it's the only way I can make it," he replied, bending close. "With you."