A/N: As always, sorry for the delay! I had finals, but now they're over. Enjoy!

Mira was waiting when Atton came stumbling out of the shyrack cave; she handed him a canteen of water, and tactfully refrained from asking any questions as he upended the whole thing over his head.

No blood, this time, only the memory of it—

"Where's the Hawk?" Atton demanded, wiping his face with his sleeve.

"Not far," she said. Her pink hair blazed in the hot Korriban sun. "Mandalore and I made it out before the thing collapsed. I was pretty sure you guys were dead, but Mical said otherwise."

"Where's Carra?"

"Back on the ship. She made it out a few minutes before you."

"Let's go, then," Atton said grimly, and handed the canteen back to her.

--

Carra kept trying to teach him the ways of a Jedi, but Atton had never cared much for their mystical babble. All their love and peace hadn't managed to penetrate his shields; all their understanding of the Force hadn't protected them when he'd poisoned them with toxins that cut off that connection. The only really dangerous thing had been their skill with the lightsaber.

But.

You have to kill me, she told him, hands spread out before her. And, I love you.

He would have to kill her to get through the door; only a fool would mistake the symbolism. And he'd run her through with his lightsaber, because he followed Carra now, and blades and blasters reminded him too much of what he had been like under Revan—

He wasn't sorry. She was dead, anyway, and Carra wasn't.

--

He wasn't sorry, but it still hurt, and when he stumbled back onto the Hawk Mira declared him in no condition to fly and tried to send him off to his bunk. Atton was having none of it. She jammed him with a sedative at that point, and Atton woke up several hours later in hyperspace.

It would've been embarrassing enough without Mical hovering over him. "You should go back to sleep," the other man said, frowning, as Atton swung his legs over the side of the medbay bunk and sat up. "I've been getting some strange neural readings—"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Atton said, rolling his eyes. "Where's Carra? Who's flying the ship?"

"Carra has very sensibly gone to bed," Mical said stiffly. "Mira has put T3 in charge of the ship—"

"He's probably piloting us straight into a black hole," Atton muttered darkly, and ignored Mical's protests as he pushed past him and out of the medbay.

His first stop was the cockpit. It was empty; T3 was probably monitoring things from the garage. Atton scowled and sank down into the pilot's chair. If Mira had let that obnoxious little scrap heap do the take-off, he was ejecting both of them out of the nearest airlock.

Although Carra would probably kill him if he actually did.

Atton pulled up the diagnostics for the Hawk. Everything looked all right, he thought grudgingly. The outer hull was due for some maintenance, but that was to be expected after landing in a sandy place like Korriban; Bao-Dur would take care of it the next time they stopped somewhere. Speaking of which—

Atton checked the star maps. Nar Shadda. He could have cheered. At least Mira had some sense.

And he could finally get a decent drink; Mical refused to let any alcohol on board the Hawk, even though Atton and Mandalore were quite vocal in their objections. The man was a menace, Atton thought darkly. Next he was going to be insisting on registering the Hawk with the Republic authorities—

"You fuss over this thing like a mother hen," Mira said from the doorway. Atton turned and scowled at her.

"I do not," he snapped. And then, "What's a mother hen?"

"Never mind," she said, coming in. "Sorry about tranqing you, by the way, but I wasn't about to let you near the controls in the state you were."

Atton scowled harder.

"You're only annoyed because you know I'm right," she informed him. Mira dropped down in the co-pilot's chair and called up the hyperdrive navigation interface. "Look, we're fine. I put in the coordinates properly and everything. I am a certified pilot, you know."

"She's my ship," Atton retorted. "She needs me."

Mira eyed him skeptically. "She's Carra's ship," she said. "And you need a shower. There's sand in your hair and you look like something a gizka threw up—"

"Hey!" Atton said, affronted.

"Well, it's true." Mira was smirking. "Go on, flyboy. I'll stay here and watch your ship."

Grumbling, Atton went.

--

He took a shower, and then Mical hunted him down and insisted he eat something, so Atton had a ration bar to make Mical leave him alone, and then he discovered that Mira had locked him out of the cockpit, possibly because Bao-Dur was also in there. Annoyed, Atton went to make sure T3 was still monitoring the ship—because Mira most likely wasn't—only to have to scrap heap chase him out of the garage, beeping something about the starboard sensor array and being very busy, thank you very much.

Thoroughly disgruntled now, Atton went to his room and flopped down on his bunk.

And then he scrambled up again, very quickly, because Carra had just appeared.

"Frack, Carra," Atton said, stamping down hard on the urge to reach for his blaster and start shooting. "I didn't hear you." And then, "Hey, you all right?"

He hadn't seen her since they'd gone into that tomb. She was in her Jedi robes again, clean now—white and tan and silver-edged, and Atton had to blink to clear away the ghosts in his vision, because she was Jedi Knight, wasn't she, and they all wore the same thing—

"Yes," she said. "I'm fine." She brushed a strand of hair back from her face and looked at him, a little hesitant. "How are you?"

"Fine," Atton said, in his best I'm-sorry-I-threatened-to-shoot-you-but-you-were-trying-to-mind-control-me-and-oh-no-this-isn't-awkward-at-all voice.

"Can I come in?"

"Yeah, sure," he said. The door slid shut behind her, and Carra reached back with one hand and locked it.

Atton's eyebrows shot up. "I had a dream like this," he drawled. "Only it involved a lot more juma, and a lot fewer clothes."

She ignored him. "Atton," she said. "I am so tired of not knowing what to do."

"Uh—you know what I'm going to suggest, don't you?"

She didn't ignore him that time. "I know," she said.

Atton could feel his smirk draining very rapidly away. "Wait," he said. "You're serious? That's what you're here for?"

Carra tilted her head and looked at him, green eyes thoughtful. "I don't know."

His heart was hammering in his chest, which was ridiculous, because this was only Carra trying to make up her mind, and—all right, it wasn't ridiculous. "But I thought—" Atton said, and stopped. Then: "But you're a Jedi."

"Shall I tell you a story?" she asked. "It's about Jedi."

If she had been lost before—well, now she was still lost, only for some reason she had turned off her commlink, as though she had given up on finding her way back. "Sure," Atton said.

Carra came and sat down next to him on the bunk, uninvited. "Actually, that isn't true," she said, half to herself. "It's about many Jedi. But this is the way I've always remembered it. This is how it starts: there was a man, once, and he was a Jedi, and he fell in love—even though it was forbidden."

"Did he get kicked out?" Atton asked.

"No," she said. "The Jedi consider it a small transgression—everyone falls in love, you know, and we are taught to overcome it, as part of our training. But this Jedi refused. He questioned the wisdom of the council. They warned him something dreadful would happen, but he wouldn't listen." Carra cast him a glance. "I think you see where this is going."

"Yeah," he said. "Let me guess—the council separated them? Or she died? Or she fell to the dark side, and tried to convince him to join her?"

"Yes," Carra said.

Atton frowned at her. "Which?"

"All of them." She shrugged. "I did tell you it was many Jedi, didn't I? All of that happened. And sometimes he cast away his lightsaber and followed her to Nar Shadda and they opened a cantina together, and sometimes he didn't, because he believed in the Code."

"And sometimes," she added, "he followed her out into the far reaches of space, and they found the Star Forge together, and he thought he could save her from what was coming simply because he loved her—but in the end they both fell."

"Revan," Atton said. "And Malak."

Carra sighed and looked morose. "See?" she said. "It's all very depressing."

He touched her shoulder. She jumped, as though startled; Atton said, "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Not really," she admitted. "I actually came in here to apologize."

"For what?"

"For what I tried to do at the Academy."

Atton shrugged. "I held a blaster to your head and threatened to shoot," he said. "I think we're even."

"Would you really have shot me?"

She had asked him that before, in the Academy; he hadn't known the answer then. "Yeah," Atton said. "I probably would've, yeah."

Carra nodded and looked unsurprised. "I took a vow, you know," she said, very distantly now. "The day the Jedi Council cast me out for fighting the Mandalorians. I promised I would never be as heartlessly manipulative as they were—not ever, even if I could never feel the Force again. But they weren't heartless, were they? They all cared."

"They cared about the greater good," Atton reminded her. "Doesn't mean what they did was right."

She sighed. "I know," she said, drawing her knees up beneath her chin. "I hated them for the longest time. That wasn't right, either."

"Yeah, because Vrook's really a model for kindness and decency in the universe." The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Carra looked morose again, and Atton instantly felt guilty. "Sorry," he muttered.

"It's all right." Carra tugged idly at the edge of her sleeves. "I never wanted to be like him. I thought—well. We were taught to protect others, weren't we? We should have protected them better from ourselves."

"Yeah?"

"Yes," Carra said. She looked at him then, green eyes shadowed. "The Council always tried to manipulate the galaxy according to their will. I thought it was wisdom, then. But some things, I think, the Sith got right—there is choice, and freedom, and we were wrong to take it away—and I very nearly did it to you—"

Atton frowned at her. "Carra—"

"It's true," she said. "I wanted to. I thought it would be for the best, you know, if you just left."

"But you didn't," he reminded her.

"You threatened to kill me if I did."

Right. There was that. "So we're even?"

"I don't know," Carra said, burying her face in her hands. "I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't tried. I wish I hadn't wanted to. I wished you were Mical, because Mical wouldn't have tried to shoot me, but then I would have forced him and it would be worse—"

"Carra—"

"I love you," she said, lifting her head to look at him. "Not compassionately, the way the Code teaches us, but selfishly—and Atton, it is such a quiet thing, to fall, and I wouldn't notice until it was over, and by then I wouldn't care."

He kissed her, because he couldn't think of anything else to do, and Carra buried her fingers in his hair and kissed him back as though she'd been doing it all her life—but that wasn't right, was it? He was her first. The thought made him pull away.

"Carra," Atton said, kicking himself all the while for his misplaced sense of chivalry. "Do you know what you're doing?"

Her hands were in his hair; her eyes were green and very bright. "No," she said.

"Then, uh—"

She let her hands drop. "I don't know what I'm doing," she said. "I'm so tired of it. I always knew what I was doing—which battles to win, which planets to take, which troops could be sent where with minimum losses—all I ever had to do was ask the Force, and listen, and I would know."

His arm was around her waist. "So—what happened?"

"I can't hear it," Carra said, lonely and lost. "I ask, and it speaks to me, but there's—there's too much in the way. I can't hear it, and I don't know what to do, and I wanted—"

If he were smart, he'd shut up now and kiss her again, because this was what he wanted, wasn't it? But maybe Kreia was right, and he was a fool after all, because all of a sudden he found that he couldn't. Vicious old scow, Atton thought uncharitably. He said: "Wanted what?"

To hear the Force again, she could have said, or to see the future, or a hundred thousand other different things, and for a moment she looked as though she wanted to; but Carra was a Jedi, which meant that she believed in things like courage and honesty however ridiculous they were, so at the last moment she sighed, and said, quite ruefully, "You."

His heart skipped a beat. "Right," Atton said, a little lamely, and he was grinning like an idiot but he didn't care. "Well. Good."

She tilted her face toward him. "Kiss me again," she said. "Please."

There was a presence at the edge of his mind, like distant music, like the sound of the wind as it blew through the tall grass of Dantooine. He touched her cheek. Sure, he said. Anything you like.

A/N: Answers to come next chapter.

On a separate note: you guys should all play Assassin's Creed, so then you can read the awesome awesome new fanfic I am writing for it. It will be well-researched. It will be well-plotted. It will have interesting characters. I wish I could take Guarded and start all over and make it more cohesive and sensible and, I dunno, just better written in general, but I've already made up my mind where I'm going with this so unfortunately there's really not much I can do at this point--but! if you've ever wanted to see what Guarded were like if it were more internally consistent and better plotted, my Assassin's Creed fic is the sort of direction that I wanted to take it in. So yeah. Sorry for the shameless plug.

On another separate note: thanks to everyone for the reviews, they really pulled me through an awful few weeks of exams and papers and exams.