Entry Thirty-Eight – Days after Geonosis Two Hundred Twelve
The image of me carrying Officer Morne out of the complex on my back has been circulating throughout the Bucket. It seems Lia captured the event via one of her drone cameras. The detail is actually very good, considering.
Not that this makes it better.
The whole thing is so embarrassing, and I look positively awful in a shattered hazard suit with my headdress off. I haven't gone without it in public since I was an initiate, and now everyone can see me that way. It's so unfair. Why couldn't I have been captured in a glamorous pose instead of exhausted, disheveled, and burned?
Of course, if that were all of it I could handle this, probably. Truthfully I've probably been overly vain about my appearance, if I'm honest. It might be ceremonial garb, but I suppose I have taken a sort of misplaced joy in being allowed to wear an elegant dress rather than the shapeless robes imposed on my colleagues. Grimy and battle-scarred does not look good on me, but I can accept that particular reality.
The real problem is the rumors circulating alongside the image. Specifically the insinuation that Morne and I are romantically, even intimately, entwined. It's spreading rapidly, usually through ridiculous gossip-mongering captions like 'Jedi risks all for Cop lover?' I've stumbled across them myself, searching the local nets, and Isoxya – possessed of the immunity to embarrassment that seems to characterize older females with grown children of many species – actually had the temerity to ask me directly whether I'm sleeping with him.
When I told her no, she followed up with: 'Why not? He's a handsome human, and you couldn't miss his interest from orbit." The gall, I…ugh!
Somehow I managed to brush those words aside in the moment, but at night, in the darkness of my little room with only wretched memories to drag me into troubled sleep, the question becomes impossible to ignore. I have not missed his interest in the least. Acting on it would be so easy, I can plot it in my mind right now. Invite him to dinner, have him take me home, ask him to come in…and the fantasies just tumble out thereafter. I confess I have privately indulged them improperly for myself, more than once.
So why not?
Of course there is the Jedi Order rule, but I find this offers only the flimsiest touch of resistance. I already risked everything for Morne, the rumors are right about that. I cannot think that sleeping with him would me more vulnerable.
But other things, important things, would change. That is what holds me back. One cannot share a bed with an official liaison and expect the assignment to remain in place. The Jedi Council may not follow underworld rumor mills, but I'm quite certain prefect Xeril does. In fact, I expect questions of an official nature shall be added to my next Joint Task Force interview.
And I need Morne. I cannot do this without him, cannot navigate this bizarre place and serve its people without the link he provides. I want to keep working with him, it's like serving alongside my master all over again, only better; for that connection was never as strong as this. This association, this partnership, whatever word I use, it goes deep. I refuse to abandon it.
In some sense, certainly that of popular holodramas, an intimate assignation might seem a natural capstone to our relationship, but somehow that feeling does not strike me. I do not envision the fulfillment of fantasies as bringing us closer, but rather shattering the existing equilibrium forged here in the Bucket. A physical relationship, however fun it might be, cannot last, and it would spell the end of the professional one – and though it hurts to admit it that would be the only proper reaction. I think on those fantasies, and as enticing as they are in the dark, I know it is not worth it. I do not want to make that trade.
I suppose that's my answer. Painful, but I feel somehow content all the same. Only, by the Force, how do I tell all this to him?