Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, from which I am not making any profit.

Author's notes:

One: I have to confess, I'm not terribly happy with this chapter. It feels OOC to me, for Anakin. But I've fiddled with it for days, and I'm not getting any closer to the answer. Probably it will hit me in the middle of the night, after posting, when it won't do any good. Either way, I'm going to go ahead and post this now. If anybody has thoughts on this, please share.

Two: This chapter is dedicated to the two people who reviewed last time: estora and pronker! Thanks, guys! You made my day! :)

CHAPTER THREE

Evinne put her hands on her hips and glared at him once Ryn was gone. The stance looked so much like Ryn's, earlier - except Ryn had looked despairing, and Evinne mostly looked disgusted - that it made something in Anakin's chest hurt.

"I don't know what you did," Evinne said, beyond exasperated, "but somehow you have made it worse."

"It was her fault!" Anakin protested automatically, and then flinched when Evinne narrowed her eyes at him.

"I know you're hurt," she told him, a little roughly. "I know ... I don't think I've ever seen anyone as desperate to be right as you are ... and I know you must have reasons that you don't tell." She shook her head, looking tireder than Anakin had ever seen her. "You're damaged goods, Anakin. I get that. But I wonder if ... if sometimes you forget that Ryn? She's damaged, too."

Anakin opened his mouth to speak, but Evinne just raised her head and looked at him until he shut it again.

"You may be right," she said, finally. "Ryn may have overreacted. And ... I'm sure knowing that she would sacrifice you to save Loreth ... has to hurt. But Ryn is the same person she's always been, this whole time. And you knew who she was. Didn't you?"

"I ..." Anakin floundered, because honestly he didn't know.

"You can keep this up if you want to," Evinne said. "I know Ryn will work with you to get Obi-Wan back no matter what. But you have to ask yourself: is this how you want to lose her?" And then she did the unexpected: instead of ending with another glare, she stepped forward to kiss him lightly on the cheek. "Think about it," she told him, and left.

Maybe she should have stayed and talked to Skywalker a little more. Been a little more gentle. He had that broken look in his eyes, though Areth'ryn (for once) seemed to be ignoring it. But comfort wasn't exactly Evinne's specialty, and she didn't think Skywalker wanted a pity fuck. So that left her with trying to help in ways that were more familiar to her style. Beating the snot out of someone came to mind.

If anyone had told her, a year ago, that she would be spending today babysitting the Chosen One and the insufferable good girl of Clan Orun, she'd have ... told them to sleep it off, probably. But here she was, and they took a lot of looking after. Skywalker was ... okay. Not what she'd expected the Chosen One to be, but okay. A genuinely decent being. Perennially obsessed with proving himself, but then he'd been a slave: that had to do stuff to you. The way he coped was by proving, every day, that he was better than that. Areth'ryn was the real problem, for now. Evinne knew fear when she saw it: that girl was terrified. Not of Skywalker, not really - if she took the time to think, Ryn had good enough sense to know that Skywalker was the last person who would ever betray any of them: he was loyal to a fault. But Evinne figured she might be afraid of herself. All these feelings. It was there in her body language, the way she moved around Skywalker as though trapped in a disintegrating orbit. This, maybe, was Ryn trying to break free.

In Evinne's opinion, she could have picked a better time to do it.

All those months of staring helplessly at her Jedi friend, longing. Surely she could have chosen a better time - any time had to be better than this - to prove she had a mind of her own.

But duty was all Ryn knew, so of course she was grasping at it in the moment of crisis. A way to choose duty over love: a final choice.

Sorry, Shorty. Your resolution will just have to wait. Life doesn't promise closure.

In the meantime, the best Evinne could do was damage control, since both her companions seemed eager to self-destruct. She pushed open the door to the ancient cell and looked around for her grandfather's advisor - some said lover.

All said witch.

"Aesin'Evinne," the old woman said, in that raspy voice Evinne remembered from her childhood. "I have heard thy name often of late."

"I've been busy," Evinne agreed. "And I won't waste time now." She took a deep breath. "You told Areth'ryn you were cursing her." The old woman nodded slowly. "But you haven't done it yet." Eyebrows went up. "You told me once only a fool lays a curse without knowing the object. You don't know Ryn that well yet."

"You're assuming a lot."

"Tell me I'm wrong."

Her grandfather's advisor eyed her warily. "And you're here to make sure I don't lay the curse."

"Depends." Evinne rocked back on her heels. "What will it take?"

Anakin found Ryn in her bath, not without some difficulty. There were guards at the door of what he would have called the 'fresher, but which contained nothing but bathtubs, a cauldron of simmering water, and clouds of billowing steam.

And Ryn.

He didn't get the opportunity to see all that at first, because the guards were not impressed with his request.

There were four of them, which seemed a little excessive, and Anakin only recognized one of them: a weedy youth who had been a farmhand before answering the call for a weaponstake, and who clearly regarded Ryn as hardly less than divine, a terrifyingly beautiful goddess of war and adolescent daydreams. He spoke first, stepping forward to bar Anakin's path while the other three looked bored.

"My lady Areth'ryn is in her bath," he informed Anakin, voice cracking.

"She can talk to me anyway," Anakin pronounced, waving his fingers past the boy's face.

Sloppy. The youth's eyes went blank and glazed as he echoed Anakin, but he hadn't put enough Force behind the suggestion to carry the other three, or maybe they were just too strongminded for it to take.

The oldest of them reached forward to grab the boy's shoulder and pull him back into line. "No," she told both of them, looking exasperated. "She can't." She eyed Anakin with distaste, apparently for his ineptitude. "You can come back when she's done."

"I need to see her now," Anakin said.

"You will have to wait," the woman answered.

One of her companions touched her elbow and whispered something in Lorethan; the older woman huffed a breath and raked another gaze over Anakin, appraising him with sharp green eyes that looked eerily like he thought Ryn's might, twenty years harder.

"Wait here," she instructed him peremptorily, and turned to crack the door. The other three immediately closed ranks in front of the opening, so Anakin couldn't see much past them but steam, but he heard Ryn's voice, speaking her native language in a low murmur.

The guard pulled back and pushed the door open further, casting Anakin a look that said clearly that she thought Ryn was making a mistake. She kept her mouth shut and closed the door behind him anyway.

Ryn was sitting upright in an enormous tub of hammered metal. She had her knees drawn up out of the water and sat casually resting her elbows on them, her wrists dangling loosely, fingers teasing the surface of the water. Her black hair was soaked and dripping, so she must have washed it at some point, but now it was piled on top of her head, held there by two ivory sticks, darker than her skin.

"Well?" she asked into the silence, disrupting Anakin's study of her. "You wanted to talk to me?"

"I ..." Anakin pulled his gaze, tracing the lines of the room, looking anywhere but at her. Ryn was naked, right there, and it should have been arousing but instead he felt vaguely sick. He'd never felt like this with her before, not even when she'd asked him to touch her in the showers on Fjornel, clearly way past the kind of intimacy they should have had.

It struck him, dully, that this was because out of all the times he'd seen her naked - and there had been a lot of them, for a friendship that had lasted barely seven months - this was the first time Ryn hadn't wanted him there. The first time he was intruding.

The first time he didn't belong.

"Yes?" Ryn prompted, a trace of impatience coloring her tone, and Anakin dragged his eyes back to her face.

"I just wanted to be sure we understood each other," Anakin began, and he could hear that he was trying too hard, that his voice was coming out angry instead of scared. He pushed on anyway. "Nothing can get in the way of finding Obi-Wan. Nothing. This thing with us ... we can't let it interfere. We have to keep working together." That's not what I came here to say, get to the point, just tell her ...

Ryn watched him, her eyes tracked on his face, unreadable. "Okay," she said, when he'd paused for breath and realized that he had no idea what to say next.

"Okay?" Anakin repeated, feeling adrift.

"You're right," Ryn said. "We do have to keep working together."

"...Oh."

Ryn waited, watching him expectantly. The silence stretched out, became even more uncomfortable than their conversation had been. I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, why can't I just take it -

"Was there something else?" Ryn asked finally.

"I ... Um. No?" He said it like a question.

Ryn frowned at him. "Do you need to watch me bathe for us to work together?"

"What?" Anakin jerked. "No!"

Ryn just stared at him, eyebrows raised, until it penetrated that she meant he should leave.

She was asking him to leave.

The shame rose like a red tide to cover his cheeks, tainted with anger.

"Just so we're clear," he ground out, and left.