"Mission, are you saying Dustil was on the Ebon Hawk?" Mission again looked at her as if she was using her lightsaber to clean out her ears.
"You a little slow today or something? He's on the ship, like you told him to be."
"Like I told him to be?" Her voice was ice, freezing everything in the cockpit, from their easygoing manners to the comfortable paces of their hearts.
"The kid was with that group of guards sent out after you. I almost shot him, too," Canderous said.
"He told us you knew he was coming along," Zaalbar added, and Katrina wondered how the Wookie language, a series of growls and roars, could possibly show the puzzlement that was clearly in his voice.
Dustil is not there. Dustil is here, on the Ebon Hawk.
Something seemed to be churning in the back of her throat and she choked it down, emitting a low growl.
"Don't chart those coordinates just yet," she snapped, turning on her heel and ignoring their confused faces at the back.
Katrina stormed through the ship, passing T3, who chirped a friendly greeting to her only to let out a whine of disappointment as she ignored him.
Dustil is not there.
It seemed for a moment that she had lost all sense of herself, that this time she had been programmed to remember only those four words.
She stopped at the farthest reach of the ship, in the crew quarters.
Dustil is not there. Dustil is here.
He sat on one of the bunks with his hands clasped together, staring defiantly at the floor as if by his will it would obey his every command.
He didn't look up as she entered the room. Only when she closed the door behind her did he speak.
"I-"
"You what?" Katrina said, this time refusing to back down.
I won't run away from another fight. Just my luck that he has to be the next one to fight with me.
"I heard Commander Knowl was sending some men out to investigate a ship on the other side of the energy field. I figured it had to be your ship, so I tagged along."
"You tagged along?" He smiled.
"More like followed them without being seen. Your Mandalorian isn't so good of a shot, fortunately."
"He might be inclined to prove you wrong if you told him so." Her words were so inane and trivial, and she couldn't think of how to tell him how close she was to conscience-numbing anger.
For a moment Katrina couldn't look at him. Dustil the young, the brave, the cock-sure, wearing that exultant grin on his red face and probably thinking he had already won.
Dustil the son of Carth, with his eyes and his smile and his face.
"You lied." The words spat themselves as if they were the crack from the whip of her tongue.
"Lied about what?" She wasn't looking but she already knew the expression on his face. He would have one eyebrow raised curiously, his grin half fallen but still struggling to be upbeat despite her obvious anger.
Carth's face was like a photograph in her mind, and she merely had to flip to the right expression.
"You promised you would stay at the base. You promised you would stay there. I promised him you would stay with him."
Insolent brat. Deceitful braggart child with no respect.
The force of her thoughts frightened her. The force of her nails digging into her palms frightened her more.
"I know." His face would fall completely now, faced with his own failure, something Onasi blood did not deal well with. "I know I promised, but I couldn't do it."
"You couldn't protect or stand by your own father?"
She heard the demand in her voice, the unrelenting request for the perfection she knew she did not want or expect but was unequivocally asking for.
"No! I...that's not what I mean..."
"Then what do you mean? I promised him, Dustil! I promised Carth that you would stay with him-"
"He doesn't know you made any damn promise!" Dustil stood up from the bunk now, staring straight at her. She still would not look at him. She paced back and forth in the room, suddenly feeling like it was a whole lot smaller.
"And what's going to happen when he wakes up?" Dustil's eyes got smaller with anger.
"You don't know that he will," he forced out, eachword taking a separate breath to be said.
"That's why someone has to be there, Dustil. You're his son-"
"I'm his son as much as he ever was my father, which wasn't often enough." NowKatrina gazed up at him. He was only slightly taller than her.
He was still that little boy with too much power she remembered from Korriban, and if anything had changed between father and son she didn't see it.
"You're going back down there."Dustil raised an eyebrow at her.
"I'd like to see you manage that."
"You're going back down there if I have to knock you unconscious and throw you in an escape pod myself."Carth's sonsmirked, and she hated him for it, hated how he had the upper hand and would always have the upper hand as long as she loved his father.
"In case you've forgotten, Knowl is hounding for your blood and if you infuriate him any further, I'll bet he'll have the whole planet hounding for it too. You wouldn't dare go back there, even for him."
"He would do the same for me."
"Oh, that's rich,"Dustil shot back, his voice riddled with derision. "Whoever 'he' is, it's certainly not my father, who wouldn't stay for me or my mother, and sure as hell wouldn't have stayed for you."
She could think of nothing else but Carth's eyes boring down into hers in those moments after the Leviathan, the same way his son's were boring into her now, condemning and sentencing her for something she hadn't done yet, but could.
"I didn't leave him because I hate him," he added finally, letting out a sigh as he said it.
"Then why did you?" Dustil Onasi leaned up against the bulkhead, his head against his arm.
"I had a lot of time to think while I was waiting around for the two of you to get back from your little victory tour." She couldn't think of anything he had ever said to her that didn't have its roots in bitterness, that didn't somewhere end in anger.
"They were touting him a hero. Everywhere I went, people were slapping me on the back and telling me how wonderful my father was, what a great man I was lucky enough to be related to." Dustil glanced up at her.
"I got angry. I got tired of everyone turning him into a god when all I remember is him always leaving me."
She was tired of everyone turning her into a mass murderer when all she remembered was a scout with a sharp tongue.
"People were...well, people would...they'd never say it to me, but you could tell that they thought I would be next. That I would become another Admiral Onasi, another hero. But none of them knew, none of them could possibly guess..." He closed his eyes.
Embracing the dark side had caught up to him. As it eventually catches up to all of us.
"And what does happen when he wakes up?"Dustil said suddenly, advancing on her.
"Do I become another piece of blackmail for the great hero? Son of Republic War Legend Formerly a Sith? Do I turn into another liability for him? Hell, he's got one big enough for anyone sharing a bed with him." She heard 'sharing a bed' and wanted to crawl under the bunks and shiver.
In the eyes of his son, she seemed forever damned to be a piece of arm candy to Carth.
"I was ready to disappear again. He didn't need to know why or how. I even hoped he might forget-"
"He wouldn't have." Dustil eyed her suspiciously but nodded in agreement.
"And then you contacted me, and I saw him." His sentence stopped abruptly, almost as abruptly as she was sure he had when he had first laid eyes on his father weakened, crippled, and completely at his mercy.
"And I still care about him," he said in a large exhale of words, probably louder than he intended to. "I didn't think I would remember it, but he's still my father and I still care about him."
She had been expecting something so much angrier, a bitter rant on how Carth had left him all his life and was now leaving him again. But instead she got his confession, his naked failure and sadness.
"I can't let him wake up and find me sitting there. He needs to see the path I should have taken, not the miserable results of the one I did."
"And that's all he'll see if you make me stay down there," he added, desperation evident on his face. "He'll see me getting angrier and angrier and I'll forget I ever cared about him again."
He wasn't as cocky as she imagined. Only afraid.
"What do you intend to do out here then? This isn't the time to reinvent yourself. I need to find whoever attacked us." He seemed relieved that she hadn't yet followed up on her promise of tossing him back onto Telos.
"I know that, and I want to help."
"You can't help." She was so short, so curt. She wondered when she had become so unyielding, so uncompromising.
Katrinawondered if she was only like that with Dustil or with everyone else.
"He was right,"Dustil said, breaking into a rueful smile. "You really are the most irritating woman to talk to."
"You've got a nice lightsaber," he said suddenly, sounding uncertain, almost nervous. The sentence seemed totally out of place amid their heated argument, and she shook her head, staring at him.
"What?"
"Haven't used mine in months, but I've still got it." He pulled it from the depths from his jacket for emphasis.
Oh, hell.
"I-"
"No."
She knew exactly what it was he wanted now.
"Put that thing away and go back to your father." He was angry again, glaring at her.
"Look, I'm making an effort here, and I need your help."
The Jedi weren't an effort. The Jedi were an all consuming force that took precedence over everything you did. Or in her case, everything you are.
"You're too old, and you're too angry. No."
"You're older, though not by much, and if you're a ball of sunshine then I'm a kath hound."
She tried to accept the fact that Dustil Onasi was standing in front of her, asking to become a Jedi. It wouldn't allow itself to be true, not against the fact that Carth Onasi was still lying comatose on the planet below.
"Revan was a Jedi long before I was." He furrowed his brow for a minute at her circular logic, then shook his head.
"You'll fall back,"Katrina added.
"I won't."
"That's exactly why you will," she countered.
She tried not to remember Dustil wielding the lightsaber, the way he had held it out at them menacingly on Korriban, the way she had been shocked to learn that he was knowingly pulling a lightsaber on his own father.
There was Carth on the surface, and there was his son in front of her. There was what she was doing and there was what she was supposed to do.
Right now she was confused as to which one her current actions were part of.
"Look," She could see everything now in his face; the exasperation and the anger, the mounting hatred and the impatience. She could see them so well that it was not unlike looking in a mirror. "You need me to like you, and the only way I'm going to do that is if you'll help me." He was trying to bait her with Carth and it only made her hate him more.
"I don't need you to like me, Dustil. I don't even need to like you myself." He set his jaw, the jaw of his father, stubbornly at her. She turned her back on him.
She didn't care anymore.
"Go back to Telos where you belong," she snarled.
"Go back to the Sith where you belong." There was a second in which she let his words register, in which she found verb, subject, and noun all neatly in place.
And then there was the next second, in which she stretched out her hand, turned around, and watched Dustil lift up off the ground and slam into the steel bulkhead behind him.