~21~

Exchange


Perhaps it was some time while Anakin and Tara lay side by side asleep, exhausted from the dancing and their tickle war, or while Lilandra and Cace talked of love and time between bloodied sheets, or even while Luke slept peacefully for the first time in weeks, no longer having to compete with Mara's snores, that Jiromie Taggant sat before the dying embers of the bonfire, keeping a silent, pensive guard over the smoldering, twisted logs and hot white ashes.

They burned on, heedless of the fine rain washing the soil around them, curls of steam rising from the backs of the firestones and saturating the air with the scent of damp and smoke.

Jiromie's blue eyes held a haunted look, not really seeing the fire pit before him, but reaching far, far into the past, wandering in a world that it seemed no one but he remembered.

It was a world he could once touch easily, but as the years had gone by, and he had gotten older, and his memory had slowly begun to degenerate, it had slipped further and further from his grasp. It was like watching someone die slowly, a little bit at a time, wasting away until there was nothing left but the shell of a formerly exuberant being.

"You do humor me, Jiromie," a dry voice said from behind him, pensive and even.

Jiromie shook himself from his stupor, and glanced uncomprehendingly at the newcomer. His eyes widened a fraction when he saw Verina, resplendent in burgundy robes and trident-like headdress, withered old hands clasped in front of her stomach.

"Grandmother." Jiromie dipped his head in respect.

"What are you doing out here in the rain all alone?" Verina asked, approaching the fire one surprisingly strong step at a time.

"I could ask you the same question," Jiromie replied soberly. "Have you been listening to my thoughts this whole time?"

"Could I help it?" Verina asked pleasantly. "I like to know what's going on in my grandson's mind." She took a seat beside him on a log, face hidden in the shadow of her ornate headgear.

"You think often on the past," she commented.

"I miss it." Jiromie turned his eyes to the fire once more.

"Of course you do," she answered, clucking her tongue sympathetically. "It wasn't easy for anyone to make the transition from out there to in here. I can only imagine the feelings our guests have begun to stir in you."

"Well," Jiromie started, but trailed off. It was not just him who had begun to feel something that had not been felt in the Whilldom for a decade. He had seen Cace slip hurriedly from his dwelling a half hour ago, lantern in hand, and disappear into Lilandra Ilkhaine's. He had not yet emerged, but Jiromie would not allow Verina to know that. He would just have to trust that his student knew enough to keep his physical distance from the senator.

And yet, in a way, he wanted something to happen between them, for that hint of feeling circulating in everyone's blood to increase in volume once they realized that the rules had again been broken. It would be as it was ten years ago, when eight adults had departed the village at sunrise, bearing stolen arms and seeds, the spirit of revolution running high in their veins … there would be hope.

It was impossible to ignore how much the attitude of the villagers had already lightened since the arrival of the Yavin Jedi with their jokes and rivalries and unbounded knowledge of the galaxy beyond. Jiromie alone knew how they had come to find Terapinn, knew that it was, by all rights, an accident, a misinterpretation of an originally misguided cry for help.

He had shown Cace the secrets of the lake against Verina's will. He had shared the same hope as his young pupil: that maybe this time, help would come.

"Tell me, Jiromie – what do you think of our visitors?" Verina asked, slightly cloyingly. Jiromie knew for certain that she was reading his thoughts. Guilt flashed through his head, and well as a tiny shiver of anxiety, though he knew that, by all rights, he shouldn't feel guilty for hoping that this was the beginning of something that could ultimately alter the future of the Whills. Verina, as their leader, would surely be hoping the same …

"I like them," Jiromie murmured. "They're very fascinating people, all of them. They seem to like it here, too. One of them, the senator, has already become friends with my student."

"The Lendene boy?"

"Yes. Perhaps their interest in each other is a little more than friendly."

He grinned, but Verina seemed greatly perturbed by this fact; evident in the way she shifted her slim frame on her log, made a deep, impatient sighing sound, and then shifted again. She looked at Jiromie, thin mouth slightly pinched at the corners.

"How can you tell?"

Jiromie chuckled, letting his head fall back, shaking his hair from his eyes. "When they were sat on the log together during the story, I could see they were holding hands. And they left for a while, during the dance."

"Alone?"

The shock in Verina's voice both amused and unnerved Jiromie. Surely she must remember the days of being in love with Jiromie's grandfather, and the thick, heady sensation that one got from being alone with their respective interest, and the bewildered stupor that followed a passionate kiss, whether it was the first or the ten hundredth …

Certainly Jiromie remembered, way back in that world he made some time to escape to each day.

"Alone. I believe he took her down to the river."

"They're back now?"

"Yes. Not to worry, Grandmother." Time to appease her fears. "Cace is an intelligent boy, and knows the rules of Whilldri. He'll not get closer to her than is necessary, or than he feels is appropriate to your demands."

Jiromie sighed at his blatant lie once he had said it, though his sigh was meant to be interpreted as pensive.

Cace was far too idealistic and, well, sexually inexperienced to follow Verina's strict guidelines for much longer. He knew what it was like to be twenty-three and all alone in the galaxy; he'd been in Cace's position once, a very long time ago. Unfortunately, he was sure Verina had caught the fib.

If she had, she didn't mention it, merely frowned down into the embers, saying to him then the same thing she had been saying to him every night more or less for the past twenty years:

"You ought to get yourself to bed, Jiromie. You'll want to be well-rested tomorrow."

Jiromie hesitated for a moment, a halted physical negotiation, but Verina waved a papery hand towards his hut, and resignedly, he went. The heat of the fire lingered on his cheeks for long after he'd gone inside the darkened space, laid down on his bed without even undressing, and stared for a while up at the ceiling before falling into a restless sleep.

Watching him retreat, Verina's frown deepened. It had been a long time - a very long time - since Verina had been in love, but she could remember what sort of promises inevitably got made and broken, and the detrimental effects that would spawn therein. That had been in the days before love had been outlawed.

She couldn't allow Cace to fall in love with the senator. Like him, she too seemed irreverent and spontaneous - good qualities for a politician, Verina supposed, but not for a missionary. People like her tended to become overly visionary when placed in a situation such as this one. And what better place for a senator to flex her diplomatic muscles than on a forgotten prison world?

If Cace became stupid with adolescent love for her, or if her feelings mirrored his, he'd have a just cause to want freedom from Terapinn.

But just causes had no place in Verina's carefully calculated world. She too had made her fair share of promises in her day, and though she had not been far from being irreverent and spontaneous at one time, she knew how important it was to follow through on a promise.

If someone had asked her twenty years ago if she thought that in two decades her people would have a shot at freedom, she would've replied yes. As it was, no one had asked her. But that didn't mean she hadn't seen it coming.

Twenty years was a long time to spend formulating and perfecting a plan, just as it was truly long enough to spend waiting for the opportunity to finally fulfill one of the most important promises she had ever made to anyone: the promise that irreverence and spontaneity would never again dominate the galaxy, starting with the silencing of the most irreverent and spontaneous beings of all: the Jedi.

Verina chuckled quietly to herself. It was finally time to follow through, after twenty years of earning her respect as leader, constructing her alibi, building up her defense … perfecting the ultimate backhand.

The best part was, no one at all would see it coming.

She knew full well what Cace and the senator had in mind. Vernira had done enough mental background work on Lilandra Ilkhaine to know that the young woman's entire past had been constructed by a series of fantastic coincidences which she considered to be some product of her own apparent influence.

Lilandra, convinced that the discovery of Terapinn was a pure stroke of good fortune and an opportunity to make her mark on a civilization - even if it wasn't her own - would undoubtedly make an attempt for the liberation of the Whills. Luke Skywalker wouldn't need much cajoling to go along with her, either, and she seemed to be on good enough terms with the others that they would follow her lead without a second thought.

Vernira made a tight fist at her side. Lilandra's cocksure confidence needed to be taken down a notch or two. Again, a miraculous coincidence: here was Lilandra, dead certain that she was at the top of her game, with a handsome admirer and plans that would skyrocket her to hero status, and here was Verina, in need of an excuse to put her own plans into action without breaking the trust of her subjects, but also eager to rid the village of the threat of Lilandra's idealism. Simply stunning.

Vernira thought for a moment, of Jiromie, sitting longingly by the fire.

She knew where he had been, in his mind. He'd been there, in the arms of that woman, a woman so much like Lilandra, filled with ideas and plans for preventing what she must have known was going to happen regardless of her efforts to convince him otherwise. Like Lilandra, she hadn't known her own potential. She was as much a prisoner as Lilandra was now, a victim of Verina's promises. Trapped, she was easy to possess.

Verina had learned much about how obsession consumes a person, eats away at them from the inside, makes them far easier to control …

She had learned much about the power of the will.

It was time to put that power to work.