Symmetry and Imperfection

Part 13

~

Naum studied the young woman sleeping across from him. In the pale, dim light from a glowball, she looked like an alabaster statue carved with a loving hand. They had hidden themselves in a cliff face that was being cut into a seaside hotel. Sound-deadening pads used by the cutting crews became soft beds in a large, rough chamber.

The streets of Truce City were thick with bounty hunters – both amateur and professional – seeking a Jedi jackpot. There were rogue Jedi hunting for Abhaia and trying to stay a step ahead of the bounty hunters. One fool had tried to command the local militia who had killed him, then started killing each other over who would get to collect the Empire's bounty for the body. Through it all, he had tried to keep watch on Abi, to lead her into a different way of fighting, trying to lead her out of the shadows that he feared would swallow her whole.

"What for, Jedi? Dead's dead no matter how it was done. I'm alive. He's not. I'm glad. Don't ask me to mourn."

He had a feeling that in fact she did mourn, but kept the secret buried deep along with a multitude of others.

For now, she appeared perfectly at rest, though he doubted that she could ever escape her past even in sleep.

No anger. Be objective, Jedi.

It was hard to hold away outrage and anger as Abhaia told him – however grudgingly – of how the larger part of her life and nearly all that she loved had been stolen by power-hungry madmen.

"It wasn't bad in the beginning. I was only two and there were lots of other kids to play with." They had hidden on the flat roof of a warehouse, under a metal awning protecting a cooling unit. "Then my parents started to fight, my grandmother and mother would argue with my father and grandfather. I don't know what it was about, but Keille and Isabail were afraid."

Abi went quiet, her eyes looking inward.

"One day my mother and grandmother came to the crèche to get me. They told me that we were going on a fun trip, and that I'd have to be very good and quiet until we got to the landing area. My mother was carrying me, my grandmother walking ahead of us."

Abi's voice was toneless, impersonal. As if she was relaying something that had happened to someone else, even as her eyes brimmed with tears that she would not shed. Naum wanted to reach over and touch her in some way, breach the isolation she had wrapped herself in, but was uncertain how this might be received.

"They were waiting for us and they were so angry. Father grabbed Mother, he was shouting. My grandfather just ran at Isabail – his wife, Force! They had been paired for thirty years! He wasn't shouting. He was dead-looking. Nothing in his eyes. Isabail drew her lightsaber and they started to fight." White-knuckled, voice trembling, Abi lifted the saber she carried. "She was a philosopher, Jedi. My mother said that if it had not been for the Jedi archivists and academics they both would have been farmers."

"Abi" He started to simply touch her shoulder, only to have her flinch away.

"She was no match for him. He cut her down. The second before his blade hit, she looked so peaceful. Then there was nothing left of her."

Astonished, Naum snapped his head around to look at her. "Abi, among Jedi, to completely become one with the Force is a sign of tremendous ability. Your grandmother is not gone, she still lives within the Force itself, a part of it, a part of everything in this universe, maybe in every universe. She must have been very adept, and very powerful."

"Not enough to stay alive." With that, she had turned away from him and refused to speak further.

When the city became quiet with the nightfall and the evening rains, they had slipped down from the roof and tried to reach either the Illumine or the Maze Dancer. Instead they wound up detouring around a three-way firefight between Kalini authorities, rogue Jedi and a coalition of bounty hunters for possession of the spaceport. Ships could be seen lifting by the hundreds, becoming a ribbon of red and green running lights fading into the silver-white when they kicked in their drives in the outer atmosphere.

Finding the man-made caves had been Abi's idea. The beachfront was pockmarked with massive natural cave systems. Many of them had been incorporated into buildings that held to the cliff faces like a clutch-crab to its host/prey. Jilla's was just a small example of the architecture; most structures were designed to hold hundreds or thousands of people.

The rhythmic rushing of the surf and the sound of rain outside their den appeared to calm her and she positioned her pad so that she could see outside. In a short time, her breathing took on the deep, slow rhythm of sleep.

Naum stood and moved stealthily for one of the passageways. There was a suite of caves with a small outcropping that looked out over the surf. It was far enough that his voice would not carry and wake Abi. He had to contact the Council and report on the success of his mission to date.

~

Rain and surf.

Abhaia had always loved them.

As a child on Lu'xiri, she and her parents had lived near the ocean. The house had been little more than columns to support a roof and moveable, counterweighted panels of plascrete for protection during storm season. Her father had taken her swimming almost from the day she was born. Even Jedi-trained children still had to form neurons and nerve pathways, but some of her earliest memories were of blue sky and floating in warm water, the sound of the surf.

Rain patting on the roof and ground had often accompanied her to sleep or was with her when she woke. The healers who had trained her told her that the sound of the surf was reminiscent of the sounds a baby heard in the womb, the white noise of rain was often used to aid in the treatment of sleep disorders.

Even after moving to Illoni, after Keille and Isabail's deaths, the sounds of rain and surf had the power to soothe her. She and Neve would curl up in Abhaia's bed under the window and listen to the rains come down. Lightning, thunder and roiling clouds would come in winter, but the spring and summer rains were mostly gentle.

So much taken. So much gone. So much more to lose.

Now she lay in the place between waking and sleeping, listening to the hypnotic rhythm of the surf amplified by the vaulted ceiling of the chamber. Her body felt so heavy, even to simply move her eyelids was too much effort. The entire day since the jump from the balcony had consisted of running, fighting, hiding, then running and fighting some more.

It seemed her whole life had consisted of the same.

Now too tired to move, too tired even to cry, she simply lay on the pad and drifted within her own mind.

Darkness enfolded her, wrapping her in velvety coolness, smoothing the rough and jagged creature she had become.

What had she become? Vader could sense her, touch her, even find her with no effort at all, yet Naum Kogan was sticking to her like a part of her wardrobe. He even tried to impart some Jedi teaching and philosophy to her here and there. Jedi and Sith, The lightest of Light and the darkest of Dark. What was she to them? Turning the puzzle over in her mind gave her no clues.

On Heca, studying her mother's notes on the history of the Danu and her grandmother's monographs of Danui philosophy, she felt another way in the Force open for her.

The Danu believed in the balance of all things. Light must be balanced by Dark. Good by evil. Birth by death. Creation by destruction. They believed that each drew and drove the other in an endless cycle of transmutation. The universe had begun with a feverish expansion caused by the death of a preceding universe. New universes could break off and grow for reasons and purposes unknown. Universes might exist like fruit on some unimaginable tree, or come into being at the flip of a credit-coin, spinning out from each turn on a path.

It was dizzying. Each road not taken might become its own reality.

The long-vanished Danu believed many things that the Jedi – the real ones – had shied away from. The very core of Danu teachings was Jedi, but had changed into something else entirely. Naum Kogan had told her that Isabail had become one with the Force, not just her mind and spirit, but her whole body. The Danu held this to be the way of the Master, that one could be so in tune with every particle of the universe that upon death the Master could move himself wholly into the universe and yet continue to exist in a distinct form.

Maybe the Jedi was right, that in some form, Isabail was still there. It was cold comfort if it was so.

Keille had not been allowed the option. Abhaia's father, Zairan, had come running to the Healer's quarters late one night and hauled Abhaia out of bed by main force. Bringing her to her grandfather's house, he had thrown her at what appeared to be a pile of bloody rags on the floor. Only when Abhaia had gently probed the broken being she had been brought to Heal had she realized that it was her mother.

The injuries she had sustained were severe and multiple. Abhaia felt a simple, loving, regret-filled caress on her mind before Keille was gone. She fancied her father avoided her out of guilt after that – not that she had seen him much in the last decade - but he had come with Bren to stop her escape.

She studied that confrontation once more. Bren had lurked in the background as Zairan first tried to reason with, then threatened her, asking if she wanted to meet her mother's end. She had cut them both down without a flicker of regret.

Her stolen ship took her across the edge of the Outer Rim and into the wild places claimed neither by Empire or Republic. Bits of her old self flaked away with each confrontation and each death until there was only a mother predator looking for a place to birth her cub. In desperation, her belly markedly swelled with child, she sold the ship to a fence on Klion and took passage to Heca, called the Hermit's World.

Out of the over one hundred billion stars in the galaxy, substantially less than one percent of the systems nurtured worlds capable of supporting unadapted non-tech-assisted humans; a few hundred million worlds at most. Human, busy breeders, highly adaptable and aggressive, filled every ecological niche they could stick a zygote into.

Yet, Heca was so sparsely populated that it was remarkable. Adopting the voluminous robes of the figures depicted in ancient friezes, she took the part of hermit, secluding herself in the temperate grasslands on the equatorial continent. There she had studied, slept, gone swimming in the gentle waves of an inland sea, and contended with the increasingly fractious, kicking, impatient resident of her womb.

In the end, Abhaia mused, Arien's impatience had paid off. The child's haste to get herself into the world resulted in Abhaia traveling with month-old child instead of a newborn.

A painful emptiness fanned to life within her at the memory of her Arien, her body crying out for the return of the life she had brought into being.

Where are you now, my Hurried One? What are you doing? Do you miss me as much as I miss you?

Tears slipped from beneath her closed eyelids, but she was too tired to raise a finger to wipe them away. Abhaia knew with deep certainty that despite what her trainers had told her, it was possible for a heart to break.

The darkness seemed to roll over her now, a wave that was carrying her to some strange shore. It felt familiar, comfortable. Like something she had known but simply forgotten. Abhaia relaxed into the strong current, letting its strength pull her where it wished, allowing it to wear at the shields she wore to hide herself from others, and herself from herself.

More tears trickled down her cheeks, she knew they were there, but she could not do anything about them. Time to heal, time to mourn had been denied her, but Neve had told her that was like letting a deep wound go unwashed. Eventually it would infect and poison the whole body. Still, she shied away, feeling the raw screaming of a fresh injury.

On the trail of grief and soul-pain came a deep surge of anger. All she had wanted was a family! A real, loving family! First Isabail, then Keille, then Arien, then Neve had been taken from her. Yes, she had given up her child, but that had been forced upon her. Arien was as lost to her now as if she had never lived.

The pull of the current seemed to increase until Abhaia almost believed she could hear the rhythmic breaking of waves on the shore. Deep, even, regular, the sound filled her head; rushing among the thoughts in her mind. Some instinct clamored to life within her, like the instinct that made the swimmer peer into the water at the feel of something beneath her.

Alarmed, she trashed and then panicked when she realized that the enfolding darkness now held her as if swaddled. The dark wave hurried to that alien shore, and suddenly the surf seemed too regular, too even. A presence whirling with the power of the Dark pulled her close, batting aside her attempts to loosen herself and escape. Her self, all that animated the flesh she wore, cowered within her last shield.

::: Lost One. Abhaia. :::

The last shield popped like a soap bubble at his touch and she felt the press of Vader's mind upon hers. He found the open wounds shrieking an insensible message of agony, touching each one with the method of one used to pain. She felt herself drawn into the spirit-storm, encompassed by it, shielded from any who might seek her.

Cool fingers traced her soul and she felt/heard the trace of compassion in his command.

::: Tell me, Abhaia. ::: She quailed as he touched each rip and shadow in her being. ::: Tell me. :::

~