Previously on Smart Jedi in Dumb Situations….

Oh kriff!

Season 3
Episode 11
Interlude, Part 6

It's over and done but the heartache lives on inside
And who's the one you're clinging to instead of me tonight
And where are you now
Now that I need you

Tears on my pillow wherever you go
I'll cry me a river that leads to your ocean
You never see me fall apart
In the words of a broken heart

In the words of a broken heart
It's just emotion that's taken me over
Tied up in sorrow, lost in my soul
But if you don't come back
Come home to me, darling
You know that there'll be nobody left in this world to hold me tight

Emotion/Robin Hugh Gibb and Barry Alan Gibb

A Suspicious Mining Facility, Sakiya, Mid Rim
39 ABY
Nine Years After The Yuuzhan Vong War

Kyp hated tunnels.

He hated the darkness, the dampness, the smell; hated the feeling of oppressive claustrophobia they gave him, it was almost enough to make him go Dark, again.

Worse than that though, he hated what this particular tunnel and the hundreds of ysalamiri living in it had done to Jel. Hated the panic in her eyes when she'd suddenly stopped running, looked around frantically, then cried out when she realized the sensation, the first sensation that would have assaulted her, was the absence of the Force. He hadn't been surprised when she had then complained that she didn't feel so well. He had been surprised when she began to wheeze, and then claw at her skin.

He would be eternally grateful for the little antihistamine hypo-spray he had carried on his belt for ages, though had never before had reason to use, because it had stopped Jysella's convulsions, which had come immediately after she had stopped vomiting and collapsed in a heap at his feet. He was pretty sure he'd never been so scared in his life as when her eyes began to roll back into her head and she'd lost consciousness for the second time in twenty minutes.

Now he sat, brushing her hair off her face, begging her to open her eyes, because he couldn't keep running aimlessly with her in his arms. He needed to slice back into the data system in this place and find a map so he would know which way to go, know what turns to take to get her out of here before he ran out of hypo-sprays, or overloaded her system and killed her with the adrenaline shots.

"Jysella?"

He held her chin in his hand, shaking her head gently, trying to get her to open her eyes. When her lids began to flutter, he thought he'd cry in relief. If he could wake her up enough to figure out how to get her out of here, away from the ysalamiri hanging all over this section of passageways, then push her into a healing trance…

"Jella… Jelly, I need you to wake up."

"Where are we?" Her voice was slurred, thick, but at least she was responding.

"On Sakiya… do you remember what happened?"

"We were running… chased." Her voice was slightly clearer when she spoke again. "What are we doing here?"

"Saving the galaxy from tyranny?"

Her tiny smile filled him with joy. "How's… that going… for us?"

"Ask me again in a couple of hours." He started to reach for the datapad from where he had left it, resting on her stomach, about to ask her what he needed to do to bring up the maps, but then froze.

"You may get that new apprentice sooner than you thought."

Kyp's blood ran cold, terror rushing through him. "I told you, I don't want another apprentice. I just want you."

"You're just saying that 'cause I'm about to die."

Kyp stroked her cheek, looked right into her eyes, "No, you aren't, Jel. I'm not going to let you die, I'm going to get you out of here."

She chuckled groggily. "Well, what are you waiting for, big guy?"

He laughed a little too, glad that her voice was just a little bit stronger with each word. "You to wake up… and tell me how to slice into this system and find us a map of the tunnels so we aren't walking in circles."

"So, I'm the one getting me out?"

He laughed again, pulling her closer, resting his cheek on her head for a moment, then kissing her hair and looked back into her eyes. "What can I say?" he whispered, "You've been such a good student, I've gotten lazy… haven't stayed up on… oh Jella, don't cry, love, it's gonna be okay… as soon as we get out of this tunnel, we'll have the Force back and you'll feel a lot better, I promise."

"I don't like this," she sobbed, as she curled into him, pulling her legs up tightly, "I feel so hollow and empty."

Kyp had been around ysalamiri, not often, but enough to know that he didn't like it. He wondered if Jysella's reaction to them had more to do with what was clearly an allergy attack then the loss of the Force itself when it suddenly occurred to him that she had never experienced this before. Jysella Horn had never known a day, a single moment, without the Force alive around her, singing through her. Corran had reached out to her through the Force before she had even been born, she'd been exerting her will over it, calling on it instinctively, coached in how to reach deep into its currents her entire life. To be suddenly stripped of this sense that she relied on the way most humans relied on sight, would be like going blind in an instant.

"I'm scared, Kyp."

He leaned his forehead into hers, wishing he could send comfort to her, rudely confronted again with the reality of just how often he himself relied on their gift, how much a part of his everyday interaction with Jysella it was. "I know, Jel, but you're going to be fine, I promise…"

She uncurled herself slightly, looking up into his eyes, fear evident in her features. "There's something I need to tell you…" she began, raising a shaking hand to his face.

He grabbed it, turned it over and pressed a kiss into her palm before threading their fingers together. "No…" He recognized the tone of her voice, had heard it before, on Kessel, Kubindi, Dantooine, she was giving up, and he wouldn't let her, the situation wasn't that bad. "No, Jysella. You can tell me anything you want when we get out of here. I'm going to call Dex as soon as we're in comm range, and he's going to come down here and get us. And he'll take us to a nice, clean, modern med facility, and screw the Council… they can buy us new X-wings and I'm not even going to try to defend why we just left ours behind…"

"I did like that TYG45…" her voice began to soften as her eyelids fluttered.

"Anything you want, Jel, just try to stay awake for me… tell me what I need to do to find the maps."

"Hit any button to wake up the drive," she directed softly, "enter access code." Her eyes began to roll, and Kyp felt panic well in him, but she continued slowly with her instructions. "Nine, one, three, Beta, Beta, two, two."

Kyp couldn't help the slightly hysterical laugh that escaped him. "Kyle Katarn's birth date is your access code? You think he's an idiot."

Jysella smiled wanly, and Kyp felt her body going slack, "No one… guess… I'd use… it." Her words were beginning to slur and her breathing became thick and raspy again.

"Jysella! Stay with me, what do I do now? Do I need to plug it into something?"

She began to wheeze again, but she was still trying to talk, "Saved it…" she whispered. "Scroll back… to… maps. Before… door specs…"

"Shavit! Jysella!" Kyp tossed the datapad and lifted her off of his lap as she started convulsing again. He grabbed the hypo-spray off her belt and bit the top off, jabbing it into her corded neck along the carotid artery, then cradled her head in his hands and waited for the meds to hit her blood stream.

When her body stopped shaking, he leaned his head into her shoulder.

"Kriff… Jel… you're going to make me even more gray." He stroked back the hair that had fallen over her pale cheek, marveling for a moment that he had never seen her look worse and yet she was still so beautiful, and kissed her forehead, knowing he would make any bargain with the Force, give anything, his own life included, for her to survive. That's all he wanted, to get her out of this tunnel and have her be okay.

He took another deep breath, grabbed the datapad and looked at the page with the diagram of the tunnels. Having picked a route, He tucked the pad into Jysella's thigh pocket and lifted her up then sighed. He really missed the Force right then. He had been wrong earlier; she did weigh as much as a Hutt, she was just packaged better.

Durron/Horn Suite, Jedi Temple and Training Academy, Ossus
40 ABY
10 Years After The Yuuzhan Vong War

Kyp sat slumped down on his favorite couch in the common room of his and Jysella's apartment, staring blankly out the viewpane at the moons setting over the Ossusian mountains. He was vaguely aware that his fingers were cold and wet, and that the condensation from his whiskey glass was making a damp ring on his pants where it rested on his thigh, but not as conscious as he was of how much his eyes burned, or that the late night news had ended a very long time ago. Raising the drink to his lips, he sipped at the watered down liquid, allowing what was left of the ice cubes to fall into his mouth, enjoying the contrast of the fire in his throat with the chill in his mouth as he crunched slowly. As much as it was possible to enjoy anything these days.

He glanced down at the thick stack of flimsy, not far from where his booted feet rested on the table; a printed copy of the medical report Cilghal had sent him that morning. It said the same thing that the other four reports he'd requested over the last year had told him; that Jel… Jysella had a potentially deadly allergy to ysalamari. Interestingly, her reaction seemed to have nothing to do with her Force sensitivity, or the animal's ability to repel it, but rather was linked to the lizard thing itself. Something in the creature's chemical make-up, possibly transmitted in the mucosal secretions in its waste product, or some component of its skin, was what had caused the reaction that she had suffered on Sakiya.

The report went on to say, again, that future exposure could exacerbate her sensitivity, meaning every time she was exposed, the reactions could get worse. But, the report also said future exposure could heighten her tolerance, build her immunity to it - them - making subsequent reactions less severe. The bottom line was still the same: Cilghal didn't know which way Jysella would respond. She again suggested exposure and observation in a controlled environment, but that wasn't going to happen.

Jysella had refused each time asked to submit to experiments, declaring that she would be a good little Jedi and carry the hypo-sprays Cilghal had concocted especially for her. By her reasoning she had gone a whole twenty years without running into a ysalamiri to begin with, she'd take her chances in the future.

Kyp knew that Jysella had had nightmares about the incident for months. He also knew that she had worked hard to hide it from him, just as he knew that the reasons she hid them stemmed from the same thing that was keeping him up at night anyway; her feelings for him, and his inability to cope with them. He wasn't sure whether to be thankful or not that she had shut him out, and tried to ignore what rushing to her side in the middle of the night to offer comfort might add to the already difficult situation they were in, or the misery it was causing them both.

When she regained consciousness after Sakiya she had told him that she loved him. He could handle that. He loved her, too. She was his best friend, his confidante, his partner, his apprentice.

What he could not handle was her insistence that she was in love with him.

They had managed to keep the issue under wraps enough to get work done, with no one around them seeming to notice the difference in their demeanor towards each other. Or, their friends and colleagues had simply chosen to ignore the tension because by this stage anyone in the Order over the age of ten knew better than to get mixed up in an argument between Kyp Durron and Jysella Horn.

It got difficult for Kyp when he could no longer hide from the fact that he was in love with her as well. He had fought it, even though he had already spent months before her declaration trying to pretend that he didn't spend a large part of everyday fighting the urge to just… look at her. She was wonderful and perfect and deserved to live a life unencumbered by the baggage that would go hand in hand with being involved with him. So he lied to her; continued to deny his feelings when he could no longer deny hers.

Things settled down after several months, and Kyp rejoiced in the brief delusion that they could somehow get through this and go back to the way things were before she woke up in that med bay and shattered his resolve to ignore the desire she had already been provoking in him.

He had done a lot of soul searching in the last year, a lot of meditating. He'd called on the Force to guide him, to help him come up with answers to his questions, but it didn't respond. It had failed to help him avert the most heartbreaking thing about all of this; that he was losing his best friend, she was slowly slipping away from him. Actually, casting it that way implied passivity on his part. In trying to protect her from himself, from what would happen and be said about both of them if it came out that a Jedi Master and his apprentice had somehow gotten 'involved', he was going to have to push her away. Not so passive. He was going to have to leave her, arrange for her to be removed, fulfill her deepest fear by abandoning her. Of course, he had the supreme fortune of getting to abandon her in a way she had never been abandoned before. Her parents hadn't spent years actively, specifically, working to convince her that she could trust them or that they would never do anything to hurt her intentionally, not the way Kyp had.

It had occurred to him on several occasions how very ironic this whole situation was. When Jysella had become his apprentice, she was so impossible, so miserable to be around, that Kyp had spent a fair amount of time musing that training her was somehow a penalty for his various transgressions in life. Then, they had formed a bond, a beautiful bond that he treasured, and now, when he was fairly certain that his life would hardly be worth living if she weren't the center of it, the real sentence became clear. It wasn't Jysella's entrance into his life that had been a punishment; it was the exit she was about to make that would be.

It had been an excruciating year. Their fighting hadn't contained the same bitterness and vitriol that it had during their first months together, but rather a heavy sadness that had weighed them both down as he tried to tell her that she was imagining her feelings, misinterpreting them, that they would pass in time, that they were an extension of some kind of perverse hero worship. When none of that worked, he toyed with the idea of explaining to her what life with him would be like if they were to allow their feelings to… manifest. He'd quickly stopped himself, knowing that to wage the battle from that angle would be tantamount to coming right out and telling her how very deeply and intensely he loved her, confessing the reality of what she, and her presence in his life, meant to him.

Then, his lifeday arrived, and what was meant to be a sweet gesture on Jysella's part, was misunderstood. She claimed that she had not arranged the trip to Velusia as a means of seduction, that she just wanted to take him someplace nice, someplace they had happy memories of, and the carefully constructed façade they had been showing the universe, trying to live in, imploded. She had locked herself in her room, not eating, not talking, he suspected not even sleeping, while he took to sleeping on the couch, terrified that she would finally emerge and he'd miss the opportunity to apologize for his lack of sensitivity or insight.

When she finally did come out, four days later, she was a new and different Jysella. Or rather, an old version resurrected to hide the pain he had caused her. She refrained from personal insult and attacks, as well as any of the hints of love that he'd only just realized had been present for so long. Her presence in the Force was shielded tightly, their connection muted to such a degree that Kyp sometimes had trouble detecting her location if she was more than a few meters away from him. They didn't chat; they discussed what needed to be discussed and not a thing more. They lived in separate rooms, sat through silent meals, went on quiet missions, until Kyp thought he would either scream or shake her to death; try one last time to make her understand that this was what was best for her. The only thing preventing him from doing just that was the occasional glimpse of pain he saw flash across her face.

They had been living like that for two months now and he couldn't take it anymore. She had completely worn him down, and he knew, from years of experience, that he was a hair's breadth from giving in to her. Tonight was the second night in a row that he had seriously debated going into her room; though what he thought he would do when he got there he was too terrified to think about. So he had commed Luke, asking for a private meeting as soon as they could get themselves to Coruscant, which would be late tomorrow afternoon, just a couple of hours before Luke was scheduled to attend the Hapan Embassy Ball celebrating the Senate's return to the Galactic Capital.

Kyp thought back to a conversation he had once had with Jacen, years ago, about pain, how it was just that, pain; something to be acknowledged, then released. Reminded of what he was about to do, Kyp let the waves of agony wash over him and tried not to think of the crushing loneliness that would engulf him when she was gone. He told himself, again, that what he was doing was the best thing for her; that given time and distance, Jysella, his Jella, would begin to live again. If the fact that the same time and distance that allowed the woman he loved to recover from his rejection of her slowly killed Kyp, then that was clearly just one more aspect of the punishment the Force had intended for him all along.

Next time on Fear and Love…

Season 4...