Revan was awake.
It wasn't much of a concern. Revan didn't sleep at normal times. In fact, he hardly slept at all outside of an hour spread across the day, an anomaly of time when his mind drew back into its dormant state and everything became quiet and still. Peaceful. Almost.
Bastila Shan distrusted the quietest moments most of all. Her charge didn't understand the meaning of quiet contemplation or meditation. His tangents, strings of ideas just barely held together by the thinnest wires of electricity, rang clearly between them even if he wasn't aware of it. And past the thoughts came the sensation, so intense they slithered under her skin and stayed there, like an itch she could never relieve. The strength of it doubled her over sometimes. During the night shift, when Bastila should have been asleep with her fellow Jedi, it just so happened to hold her awake for hours.
Tonight? The thin cotton of his blanket itched at her fingertips. The cold, metal deck spread flush relief through her sore toes. Clammy palms.
His quarters in the Endar Spire were obscenely warm, something which annoyed both him and Bastila alike. For days now, Bastila had laid in her cot, back slick with sweat, cheeks flush, practically burning under her sleeping robes. She could have blocked him out, blocked it all out, given herself relief and maybe even a semblance of privacy, but she didn't. She couldn't. Bastila watched, waited, searched for anything that might hint that he knew something he wasn't supposed to.
Because Revan didn't know he was Revan. Revan was named Alexander. Alexander didn't know about the bond. He hardly knew anything about Bastila at all.
Bastila endured. When Revan was awake, she was awake, probing his thoughts, sifting through his streams of thought for any hiccup, any tributary out of place. She slept on his schedule and even then not much. A few minutes maybe. His constant presence in her mind had become something of a constant, a security blanket that she could always check to ensure she and the rest of the crew were safe.
That the Dark Lord of the Sith hadn't risen again to murder them all.
So much so that the lack of his presence, the pregnant silence, unnerved her, nearly made her sick with worry. Her stomach would curl. What if he had discovered the bond? What if in her careless surveillance he'd noticed her presence and cut her off? What if he knew something she didn't? What if it was all some ploy and he'd known his identity the entire time and really he'd been playing them all for fools and her most of all and he'd . . .
She tossed around on her cot, burying the anxiety, palming the stray tears threatening to escape the corner of her eyes. She was exhausted beyond reason, but what rare sleep she procured brought little comfort. The nightmares never ceased, made even worse because she didn't know who the nightmares belonged to.
Especially when the nightmares sometimes felt more like memories.
She'd cried more in the last year than in her entire life. Even being pulled from her father as a child hadn't elicited so much from her. The skin under her eyes had withered to the color of tombstones. Her hair was a ratty mess, thin and stringy, more often greasy than clean. It used to be longer. After her . . . confrontation with Revan, she'd given up on maintaining it and chopped it to the length of her shoulders.
Sometimes, when she dared look at herself, she wondered if the secondhand exposure to Revan's aura before Malak's betrayal had seeped the darkside into her features. The guant in her face had grown more pronounced. Her skin under the Spire's lights was dispassionate and chalky. Her eyes, bloodshot and droll, made her lips curl in disgust. Could the Dark Lord be that powerful? Or had she merely given up on trying to maintain appearances since Revan's defeat?
The Republic's Savior. The Jedi's golden padawan. The Jedi who had faced Revan and lived, and not only lived, but saved him from death.
And what had it gotten her? Nothing short of being tied to the Dark Lord forever, with no way of escape because the Jedi needed Revan, needed his memories even if he couldn't provide it to them willingly. And they needed Bastila, even if it meant she never slept a restful hour again in her life, if she lived in fear every moment of every day.
She still remembered, with clarity, how easily Revan slaughtered the other Jedi. Their bodies mangled on the bridge, forming a path of destruction deep into the maw of darkness. Sometimes, Bastila wondered if she'd made the wrong decision. Maybe she should have left him on that bridge, bleeding out and unconscious. A final retribution, and then peace.
There is no emotion, there is peace.
But Bastila felt everything. She grit her teeth and bunched her blanket in her fist. She couldn't leave him. Even as the bridge erupted in fire and smoke and blood, and she kneeled over the crippled body of the Dark Lord, every muscle in her wouldn't have allowed her to leave without atleast trying to save him.
His face . . . she thought of it often. It haunted her. It was so human, so tangible, webbed with cuts and colored with blood as it was. Now, aboard the Spire, he almost seemed normal. A regular man dressed in regular clothes, walking amongst the Republic with a beaming smile and eyes brimming with cunning. The change should have disturbed her, but she was instead struck with a hollow pang of nostalgia.
She remembered a Jedi Knight, a Revan before he was the Revanchist, with that same smile and eyes that could break down and build back up a person in mere moments. He had been so confident, so brave, so obscenely obstinate. Bastila had almost admired him, envied him.
She envied him no longer. Ironic really, that the traits that constructed his legend, the hero of the Republic, were the same ugly virtues that had gnarled his heart to the dark side.
But it didn't matter now. Revan was gone. There was only Alexander, and Revan . . . Revan . . .
Her heart stopped. Bastila was cold. The sweat on her back felt like lakes of ice water freezing over the flesh. Silence. She heard the light breathing of her Jedi companions in their cots. The buzz of machinery through the walls. In her mind, there was only her voice, a single solitary voice calling out to no one at all.
She sat up and escaped her quarters, snatching her lightsaber from her belongings. The path to Revan's quarters remained memorized, close enough to be within quick walking distance, but far enough to avoid questions about his peculiar stationing within the ship. Bastila still received questions anyway, but she didn't bother to give a clear answer. They were all irrelevant. All that mattered was that Revan remained near her at all times. If the crew of the Spire knew the truth, they'd appreciate the strategy of it all.
She passed soldiers on patrol in the halls. They stiffened, saluted, but she barely heeded them. The lights overhead hurt her eyes. A growing migraine hemorrhaged her skull. The silence within her own mind bothered her. Her voice sounded tinny and in truth Bastila almost didn't know what to think about for herself. Rarely did she ever have her mind to herself.
Revan's thoughts were innocuous, lined with ideas and hypotheses Bastila didn't claim to understand. It was a steady flow. Never did he stop or settle, always one thought to the next for hours and hours on end. Bastila didn't understand it, but the noise had become commonplace, almost like the background hum of the engines housed deep in the Spire's armor.
Without it, the world was vacuous, a claustrophobic bubble devoid of sound.
Bastila almost felt . . . lonely.
She grimaced, gripped her lightsaber tighter, cleared her thoughts. Not a hint of his presence drifted through the bond. The sensible side of her, the side of her that had seen and recorded this very same walk through the ship multiple times, knew that he was only asleep. Harmless. Innocent. The paranoid side of her however, the one that recalled with vividity the blood red of his lightsaber and the blank cruelty of his mask, wouldn't let her be.
He could be hiding himself from her. He could be awake in his room right now, plotting, maybe even waiting for her to arrive. A trap. Revenge. Could the Dark Lord be so skilled? Could the master's illusion have been shattered so easily?
She clutched her weapon tight to her body as a nauseating panic clenched around her heart. The walls and ceiling around her narrowed to a single point in the distance, until the end of the hallway seemed like an infinite distance away on the horizon. The world was too quiet and loud at the same time. The echo of her boots on ship plating rang like deja vu, triggering the recall of a memory.
Approaching the bridge, the Dark Lord awaiting her, stepping over the bodies of Sith and Republic soldiers . . .
If the Dark Lord returned, would she have the strength to kill him? Would she pierce her lightsaber through his heart? Could she even hope to finish him?
In the aftermath, the Galaxy would be silent again. Eerily, hauntingly silent like the whisper of the breeze over Dantooine's open fields.
She approached his door and pressed her ear to it. Nothing. She extended her senses and saw his aura burning through the metal. No irregularities. Bastila bit her lip and activated the door control.
The lights were still on. Revan was slumped in an awkward pile on his cot, half his body slung over the top of his blanket and the other half flopped over the side. Drool slipped from the corner of his mouth and darkened the sheets. His features, smoothed over by the veil of sleep, twitched irregularly, almost adorably.
The sight was a familiar one, but it still knocked the wind from her. Her relief could have brightened the dark side of a planet as easily as that planet's sun. Her lightsaber nearly tumbled out of her fingers. Immediately, her paranoia dwindled and a tentative confidence grew in its place.
We're safe, she thought, I'm safe. The masters knew what they were doing. They would not so easily be foiled by one man, Dark Lord or no. Of course not. Revan was gone. Completely. There was only Alexander and the memories of a dead man.
"Alexander," She murmured, "Alexander."
The name tasted plastic on her tongue, synthetic. A mashing of syllables without meaning, she considered, without power. The man groaned softly, snorted in his sleep, and shifted more onto his shoulder. Bastila observed it all with a keen, morbid interest, as if she were watching a newborn explore the world for the first time. How strange it was to watch a man who had conquered the Galaxy nearly two times over revel in complete vulnerability, with a trail of saliva highlighted on his chin and a crooked arm flopped over his eyes.
"Alexander," Bastila repeated. She stepped just a bit closer, until her feet had crossed the precipice of his doorway. "I am not afraid of you."
A stifled snore was Alexander's brash response.
Good. He'd acquiesced. What more was there for Bastila to be paranoid of? They both knew who was the dominant one in this situation, who controlled the bond, who knew the truth, who still possessed a grasp on their identity. On reality.
She was Bastila Shan and Alexander was only Alexander. Her ward. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Bastila stepped back and closed the door, separating the two. Maybe, given a bit more time, she'd build up the courage to speak to him and truly know the facade of a man the council had constructed. Maybe they could be friendly. Imagine that? Her and Alexander. Friendly. She cocked her head at the thought as she dragged herself back to her quarters, idly tossing her lightsaber from hand to hand.
Maybe that would be nice. Maybe tomorrow? Yes, possibly tomorrow. Possibly. She reached her cot and flopped down. Her head struck her pillow and in the blink of an eye, darkness fell over her and Bastila cocooned into a foggy, deep slumber.
Then the Sith attacked over Taris, and Bastila's promise of a tomorrow was quickly forgotten.