Kess woke up with the overwhelming sense of pain. It felt like a heart was cut out of a chest, and deliberately, by some evil power. Helplessness. Tears. Teeth-clenching anger against the source of the loss. Her hand found the small bunk cubby on the Falcon. The ship still hummed with hyperspace. Alarmed, worried, she switched on the little light and half sat up, sensing out.
It wasn't Nik. The Force Print bleeding into her brain was too foreign. But it was a man. She could feel the testosterone rage with a protector's wrath. And it was close. Very close.
She whipped the blanket from her legs and jumped quietly out of bed.
Vanech wasn't using the Force, but he was suffering a terrible nightmare. She tiptoed down the round corridor to his bunk and approached en guarde. She needed to wake him, but considered to have her lightsaber handy in case the dream escaped into awakeness. But no, when Vanech woke, the last thing he needed to see was a weapon.
Nervous to keep him from waking too soon, Kess reached across this body and Force Pulled his little lightsaber out of the corner of the thin mattress.
Vanech flashed into action, grabbing her by the collar with one hand as he reached for the lightsaber with the other. His face was a twisted mess of rage. But she yanked the hilt out of his reach before he could grab it and hid it safely behind her hip until he realized he was awake.
"It's just me."
Vanech blinked and shuddered. He fell back against the bunk, letting his hand fall from her shirt, and rubbed his angry eyes. "Go away."
"No." Kess said it before she thought about it. But then she thought about it. "No, I won't."
He rolled to his hip and grabbed her shirt again, bringing her nose to nose with his wrinkled face. "I said GO AWAY!"
She sensed Chewie now listening with alarm from the cockpit. She sensed Han begin to wake up. But she kept the man's eyes with calm and peace. "Breathe."
Vanech shoved her away from him so hard she nearly fell. He rubbed his face again, his mouth in a snarl. "Jedi tricks can't fix this."
"No. But they can help you deal with it."
Chewie's naked feet padded quickly down the corridor at her, but she blindly waved him away before he came to close. She stepped carefully back over to the bunk and met Chewie's warning gaze with resolve. She waved him away again and nodded. I've got this.
Vanech sat up in the bunk, but he looked deflated. His shoulders had to curl over and still the back of his head bumped against the top rim of the cubby. He sighed hard at his own lap and curled both sets of fingers into his knotted hair. "Give me my lightsaber back."
"In a minute." Kess assured, and settled her shoulder against the nearby bulkhead to wait with patience.
His eyes looked around the dark ship, awake now, and turned over his shoulder to reach back and grab a pack of death sticks from a slot. Kess watched him light it up and close his eyes at the first deep drag, as if that was going to fix it.
But she didn't comment on it. She understood it. Such habits always felt like they were helping, even though such habits just made the problem worse by stuffing crap away in a corner to fester even more. It wasn't far different from her father's drinking.
After a moment, he offered her a drag with a simple gesture.
"No, thanks."
Vanech shoved off the bunk so he could stand his full height, but he didn't seem to be interested in going anywhere. He rested a forearm against the bulkhead and drooped over his smoking death stick.
"Who was it?" She asked gently. "Who did you lose?"
His eyes glanced over but ignored her. He didn't answer. The pain swelled up first, and then his rage erupted right after it. The Force flashed with an incredible urge to slaughter every last one of them.
The sheer force of it disturbed her. It was a loss, yes, but it was like the loss of one's own limb. They took something from him he couldn't stand to live without. Something he shouldn't have to live without. This was far stronger than a brutally ripped love torn in two. This wasn't a sibling, or a parent, or a wife. It was worse.
Kess stepped over and touched his arm with her fingertips, just to give the man some gentle tactical connection. She grew hopeful when he didn't pull away.
He swallowed hard and sucked in a new drag, talking through the smoke as it escaped his mouth. "She was about to turn thirteen."
Kess's soul soured in the overwhelming loss too. A daughter!? She closed her hand around his forearm in her own shock, flooding with a craving to relieve him of some of this overwhelming pain. No one should have to outlive their own child.
He tried to keep it in, he tried to slam it back into the darkness of his heart, but his teeth clenched and his face pinched, and he curled his head over into his forearms.
Tears seeped from her own eyes just to feel the blinding pain bleed out on the Force. Timidly, her palm went to his back and the other closed around his naked forearm, almost a loose hug, but not quiet. She wondered if it was recent or just coming out now that Luke had softened him up, but she did the math. Vanech could not have been older than thirty-five, so the death of a twelve-year-old daughter could not have been more than a decade ago, even if he accidentally conceived the girl when he was a teenager.
He cried, tight and angry, into that wall. His death stick smoked in his loosening fingers. It was about to fall, so Kess reached up and gently pulled it from his hand.
He glared over at her with new anger for taking it away.
So she met his eyes and sucked in a little puff of smoke for herself, inhaled it with practiced memory, and handed it honorably back.
The man grinned. He took it and turned around, dropping his back against the curved padding on the bulkhead, and sucked in another drag of his own. He didn't wipe the small tears from his eyes when he focused on her. "Some things can't be meditated away," he said roughly.
She struggled for something wise to say. "Some things shouldn't be meditated away."
His brow flicked in surprise that a Jedi would say that.
Kess settled her back against the opposite curved padding and shrugged. "Sometimes meditation is only to take away the sting. So you can think smart."
Vanech lowered his eyes to stare at the deck.
"What was her name?"
He inhaled a breath and lifted his chin to meet her eyes. "Halsey," he said, then smiled a little. "I named her after the Jedi statue we conceived her on."
Kess flashed a little smile. "Pretty stiff defiance there, scrogging on Jedi statue?"
Zach smiled more too, shaking his head and looking away at the memory of it.
"Where's her mother?"
"Who the fuck knows?" He groaned. "She didn't even finish breast feeding before she took off."
Kess was quiet and patient, letting each question and answer settle in the peaceful nighttime before she dared another one. "Were you married?"
His scoffed, "Hell no." He knocked his head back against the bulkhead. "I almost did, later, but the life doesn't really fit in with my business model."
Kess fought a tight grin at the reality of that. "I suppose that's true."
Ice eyes smiled through his sadness, but they shifted to a serious warning. "You let me out of this ship, on that planet, in the middle of a battle, I'm going kill a lot of fucking people."
She rubbed her lips and bit them closed.
"I know it won't be enough. It won't fix it. Or solve it. But I'm going to do it anyway."
Kess mentally scrambled to figure out how to talk him out of this, but it was clear in his expression he wasn't going to budge.
"So stay out of my fucking way." He sucked in a drag and blew it into the air. "Okay?"
Kess could only nod.
He watched her, hard and cold, and crushed out his stick on a panel, uncaring of the mess it made. He reached his hand for his lightsaber.
Hesitant, Kess handed it back.
He took the hilt and waved her to go away. Without pausing to see if she would, he climbed back into his bunk and laid down, gripping the lightsaber to his chest.
Defeated, Kess stepped back to her own buck and laid down, eyes wide open to fear the consequences. Zach was till swimming in the dark side. Killing a bunch of people was only going to shove him deeper. Kess closed her eyes at a new truth; Zach Vanech didn't want to be saved.