Kessel Run, Week 2: Write a story between 400 and 800 words using second-person POV in which a character describes something to another character.
This week we're jumping forward about five years and focusing on something a little happier. My girl Nidia hasn't had much screentime in this 'verse, but that's about to change…
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Sparks
51 years post-RotS (32.5 ABY)
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Even with your eyes closed, you can tell he's staring at you.
"What is it?" you say with a laugh, cracking one eye open.
"Nothing," he replies quietly. "I've just never meditated before."
He sits across from you at the center of the clearing, legs folded under him and wrists resting across his knees in imitation of your own pose. The tampasi is especially vibrant today, bathing happily in the light of Zonama Sekot's chosen star. A perfect day to touch the universe.
"Try closing your eyes and breathing. Like this." You straighten your back and shut your eyes, and the air around you changes as his breath joins yours, rhythms matching. You search for something meaningful to say next, some profound scrap of Jedi wisdom, but the only words that come to you are the ones you heard Jacen use with his students only yesterday morning – hardly the vaunted proverbs of millennia past. And yet…
"Feel," you murmur, "don't think."
There's hesitance in your sense of him, and for the tiniest fraction of a second, you wonder if he'll say he doesn't understand, or he doesn't know how to do what you're asking, or that you're not giving him enough to work with. But you release those worries into the air as quickly and easily as you release a breath, because worrying won't change the outcome, and if you're meant to guide him in this, the path will reveal itself.
And besides, it's a gorgeous morning, abundant with life and sunlight, and you're meditating in your favorite place on this whole planet, where you've never not felt totally at peace. In fact, this might be the happiest you've ever been, with the pulse of flora and fauna thrumming alongside your own, and the breeze whispering across your face, and the sun warming your skin, and beneath it all, that ancient, encompassing sense of wisdom and wonder that you know to be Sekot, both a distant horizon and a safe, familiar embrace.
You smile, then, as it occurs to you that distant, familiar, and safe could all be used to describe the soldier seated across from you. What words would he use to describe you in this moment, you wonder?
Now there's a silly thought, you chide yourself – affectionately, of course. You've always been prone to daydream; it's just part of who you are, and you accept that.
"Can I ask a question?" His voice is steady and serious, as it always is. You've seen the others tease him for it, but it's one of the things you like most about about him.
"Of course," you answer with another smile. Your eyes are still closed, but you can well imagine the earnest set of his mouth, and the shine of sunlight in his close-cropped hair.
"What do you feel?" he asks.
The wind rustles the branches overhead; shadows flicker across your eyelids.
"I feel warm, content… like there's sunlight under my skin, holding me close. When I listen to the tampasi, I hear it answer inside my heart, like it's echoing my pulse and filling me with all the life around me, and if I focus my thoughts on any one part of it, I become part of it, too. A vine, a cicada, one of the people back at camp… anything."
"Me?"
Sunlight under your skin, impossibly warm and impossibly bright. "You."
"How do I feel? To you, I mean?"
Safe.
You breathe in and back out again, focusing on the eddies of energy that define him to your senses. He doesn't burn the way so many of the others do, eager to prove themselves, ready to charge into the fray, into any fray if given the chance; but he isn't the glacial stillness of ice and rock, or the bone-deep chill of an arctic wind either. There is heat there, you can feel it. An image comes to mind, and you wonder if you should say it out loud, or if it will embarrass him. Not that he seems the type to embarrass easily.
"You feel like… like a hearth fire that's gone cold, embers covered over with ashes and earth, but all it would take is one spark, in just the right place…"
As the words fall off your tongue, you sense movement. His. A deeply drawn breath, held and then exhaled. The hands in his lap suddenly restless, wanting to reach out—
You bridge the gap without thinking, taking his hands in yours as you lift your face toward the sun. His grip is strong, his fingers worn and calloused. There's a flicker of heat in your sense of him, the warmth of embers. "I'm glad it was you who came looking for me," you tell him.
His hold tightens almost imperceptibly. Almost. "Me too, Nidia."
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