“You have to let go of excusing every evil thing that happens simply because you don’t care to do anything.”
Friyr hadn’t spoken much to Sahley on their trek back to Eedit. He regarded the mountain as meditative. The journey to it as spiritual. Friyr merely counted himself present for the experience of returning to it. Each beath was hard won as the altitude rose and his thighs quivered with the exhaustion of a well-walked day. Chirping birds, bats, and insects filled the air, and the Force filled his mind. All consuming and yet clear, like cold rain in the middle of a tropical day.
The steps built into the mountainside eventually turned into flat rock platform, and Friyr knew they had arrived. He sat in the dirt, refusing to walk further than they had. He waved a hand. “Go go. I’ll catch up,” he said breathlessly.
Someone hesitated but turned and left the Jedi to his sitting. Friyr looked out over the dusky blue sky without any notion of what he was seeing, but he knew that it felt beautiful. The Force that resided inside him told him as much.
He knew this in the same way Sahley sounded like water. Though that was all Friyr knew about Sahlye anymore.
___
Friyr tied the hair in his eyes up into a scruffy tail atop the crown of his skull. It stuck out like bristlebrush and the shorter pieces fell out in messy little strands over his ears, but visual appearance had never mattered much to Friyr’s vanity. And Friyr was a vain little creature.
Eedit’s basement was silent as the stone it was made of and so was Alema. Friyr let out a breath and listened to the gentle reverbrations off the walls. Stone was both ugly and beautiful. The concepts were not separate in Friyr’s mind. It made horrible sounds, offered no gentle touch, but it too offered security. It was the lifeblood of trade, organic life. Thus was how Friyr judged beauty.
He closed his blue eyes. That they remained open was more courtesy than need.
He unhooked the lightsaber from his belt and switched it on. It was smooth. Friyr could feel the blade extending through the hilt in the pads of his fingers. The beam of light arched through the different lens into the mouth of emitter - where it errupted into sound and color. The hum of the blade traveled into the bones of his arm, wrapping it in a kind of power.
Friyr flexed his wrist, straightening it into a proper grip and breathed in. The light was faint against his translucent eyelids. Red had a way of doing that. Even the fuzzy purple blade he’d modified from a ready-made hilt was brighter. And, for that - though he’d never seen it - Friyr considered the color red pretty. Beautiful in fact. Though, it had never been his luckiest color.
From red heads, to red skin, to an Empire drenched in the red of blood.
“Ready?” his old master asked.
The sound of her skirt made a muffled shush against the floor as she widened her stance and switched her own lightsaber on.
“Course.”
She waited, balanced on the balls of her feet, and Friyr took the opening. Simple as a game of chess played a thousand times, but complicated as they played it once more. The moves were old, but the construction of the fight was unique and evolving as the players.
Friyr met resistence against his lighsaber, tasted the heat of sparks against his sun damaged cheeks.
She shoved him back, and Friyr spun off the momentum, slashing quickly at her flank. She caught him, but the crackles of energy were loud. Friyr’s hilt jumped under his palm. He’d caught her at the emitter. He adjusted the angle. Alema’s catch slipped, and Friyr siezed the chance to sweep one hand from its purchase on the hilt.
She grunted, and Friyr smirked. It was a short lived although sweet victory as a wall of Force caught him in the chest. The breath knocked clean from his body. So he thought until he hit the floor and the remaining air fizzled from his lips.
“Ow.”
“I’ve seen you Sun Djem Sahley too often,” Alema remarked about the beforetimes as she waited for him to get up.
Not Sahley. Friyr wanted to talk about anyone but the revolutionary little Mirialan. Sahley’s heated words stung fresher than the ache Alema had rattled into Friyr’s lungs.
“Sometimes I forget Sahley had a lightsaber,” Friyr groaned from the floor. He’d be feeling the impact in his left side tomorrow morning. The penalties of age.
“I doubt that,” Alema said in her blunt innocent way. “You had a nickname for him derived from his lightsaber.” She paused. “I don’t remember what it was quite.”
Friyr groaned and coiled his legs. “Dukarte Vidta.” He srung up and stepped into a low cut at Alema’s midsection, that she predictably blocked. He didn’t throw his full weight into the blade lock. His lightsaber sprung off of it going high. “Means Double-Saber.”
Alema grunted again in exteriton as he forced her to windmill the heavy lightsaber. Friyr grimaced as well. His back wasn’t what it used to be. But she was feeling it too. He muscled through the pain into a step forward, and she stepped back. A hot pole of energy burned Friyr’s abdomen in sacrifice for the ballsy move. He skittered back a half-step and wobbled.
“You two were close,” Alema mused. Friyr felt his face flush. “He misses you sometimes, you know.”
Friyr sacrificed the whole step forward for four back as Alema jabbed at him again. He had a good position, but the conversation was making him feel...some type of way. He circled at a safe distance around to her other flank, trying to place her back up against the wall.
“Sahley an’ I don’ really get along too well anymore, Alema. S’in the past.”
A sour feeling rose in his gut that had little to do with the fight.
“Sahley is too passive, and you’re too quick to judge a situation.”
Friyr half-shrugged and pressed the attack, knowing that a victory wasn’t possible with his guts full of nostalgia, acridity, and tinges of wistful desire.
“Sahley’s torn up about some stuff I did like years ago. Things I can’t change. And-- I suck at apolo--” Something hard caught him in the middle. “--gies.”
Alema had used the wall as leverage to kick off of, putting Friyr back on the ugly stone floor. He didn’t get back up, instead choosing to catch his breath.
“Geeze.”
Alema’s footsteps ran up his spine as she walked to him. Her lightsaber retracted.
“If you can help him move on from something he’s attached to...”
She leaned down. Friyr could feel the heat of her hand over his skin. He took it.
“It’s my compassionate duty to,” they finished together. “Yeah, yeah. Good talk.”
Alema slapped Friyr on the back good-naturedly. With her hand. Her heavy, strong, broad hand.
“Owwwwwwwwwwwww.”
“I-- Sorry.”
“‘M like tiny an’ old Alema, y’can’t just do that.”
Friyr deposited the fluffed blanket onto his mattress. Another amidst the silky green fabric he’d picked up on Corellia and the plump pillow he’d found on Alderaan. Small trinkets in addition to the simple beddings he’d stripped from the temple. They were nothing fancy if of quality make. A Jedi lived in moderation perhaps, but Friyr had a lifetime of sheets that kept just enough of the chill out. He’d roughed it, endured desert nights and the swampy monsoon rains of Kaas in the wet season. He’d lived on simple cots full of molding straw and threadbare weave. Then there had been the simple white pallet.
Friyr closed his eyes rather than remember that comfortable cruelty. He shook his head. He exhaled in the silence until his lungs emptied. The tap of his index finger kept time with the breath until there was no more. A blanket of calm settled over his shoulders, making them heavy. Friyr wanted something a little bit more than learning to make do. Then again, he always did.
He settled into what was quickly becoming a nest of blankets and soft things with a heavy sigh. s he reached for his pillow, the back of his knuckles grazed something cold and hard. He stroked his fingertips over the metal surface, knowing intuitively the touch of his friend even at the most unexpected moments. There was a soft warmth to the cold buried under layers of NM-1′s hibernating circuitry. Friyr patted him gently, then forewent the pillow, pushing it beneath his head, to pull him arms around the droid instead. The metal edges pressed into his forearms; a cold snowdrop against his heart and belly for a moment.
He was home. Friyr absently stroked the carapace. It was lonely in the absence of company. Bendo left with Master Tabris’ new apprentice, leaving Friyr alone again. NM hummed gently in his arms and Kyuga’s breaths were clear across the small dwelling. Friyr was not a lonely man in any respect, but the feeling sank in during the between times with an ardent need to be felt.
Friyr squeezed the droid unconsciously and gazed at the dim gray in his vision reflected from moonlight spread over NM’s hull. He knew the semblance of things that were said about his recent absences. The prolonged galaxy tramping that took him to the edges of wild space and turned the council into a distressed collection of tinny voices over the holofrequency.
Friyr’s a free spirit; Troubled; I don’t think Friyr knows how to care about people who care about him.
It didn’t bother him, but he knew that in some way they danced around a knot of unsettled reasons all snarled together in a ball of discontent. He didn’t think that the galaxy would undo them, but the challenge of finding his way back home had occupied a troubled heart for a while.
Friyr had quickly learned that Force bonds were not lightly made for the sole reason provided in the ache of separated hearts. He had said goodbye in ten different ways every morning and evening to Kurt Wax, known what they shared was a fluke of proximity, and yet. Yet. It still hurt feeling the intensity of an emotion Friyr had never known from the man given to another. Someone Friyr didn’t know beyond Kurt’s stray feelings and dreams where Friyr imagined himself a watery version of the Pureblood. But he knew enough to know that Kurt had finally fallen in love.
It was the reason he’d leaned over with a smirk and bitten into Sahley’s fruit all those months ago. Friyr hadn’t really expected to be led out onto a porch by the hand and asked if he felt the sun on his skin. He’d slept with the man as a sort of flippant pasttime only to have that flippancy flipped on its head by a particularly tender Republican.
Friyr didn’t know what he felt for Sahley other than an infrequent need to hold him or steal a kiss when they were alone. To be around him. Sometimes Friyr wondered in particularly painful moments - where he could feel Kurt’s heartbeat a little too strongly - if Sahley was a key - not to twist in a lock - but to wedge against the fabric of the Force bond as a makeshift knife and sever the ties.
It was that alone that convinced Friyr he didn’t deserve stolen kisses or the precise time of day from the tenderhearted soul. Friyr wedged space between the two. Rebuffing Sahley’s need to reaffirm their tender friendship with a firm shove instea. Friyr had never shared something so gentle with a friend before. But it had felt so right to not call the mirialan his own but rather someone he expressly cared for just a little bit more than he did for others. Sometimes a very silly part of him that was always running off on fantasies about giving boys flowers would doubt with a certain sincerity that bruising their friendship - not letting things progress into a comfortable but ultimately platonic intimacy with the potential for more - was wrong. It was easier to listen to that part of him while Master Tabris grieved the death of her late husband, her one love. It was easier to pine for someone to care for Friyr the way she had wanted Rajjaet to care of her.
Friyr left. Confused, anxious, and with too much time on his hands - he pulled on the green cloak Teran had given him, strapped his lightsaber on, and went to try and be a Jedi the best he knew how. He settled a few disputes on Carrick station by placing his body between others and flashing the lightsaber on his hip without revealing once its color.
He had a panic attack in Nar Shaddaa, then fell in love with the bastions of opportunity and freedom the Hutts cultivated, while also finding poverty of the worst kinds that made his giddiness an uncomfortable feeling.
Wild Space held people he had once sought for. Friendly, dishonest, and genuine to a fault. Friyr had stayed there longer than he liked to admit. The aliens and humans there reveling in an unjudging company that cared very little about Jedi, Sith, or some down on their luck spacer. For a few days there was no war; just people who understood the gripe of being alive.
He came back, and Kurt was still tied somewhere behind his naval, Sahley no doubt lingered - but he was just grateful to be home. In truth, the wide galaxy scared him as much as it fascinated.
Friyr burrowed into his covers and felt the empty space in his heart. He didn’t make a resolution with it, didn’t seek for peace. He would have to feel this for a while. A long while perhaps. As long as this night might last because he couldn’t sleep. Not yet. There was so much to feel before his bones settled, but Friyr had the time to do so. He could accept it or let it eat him.
Sahley drew back from the holoshelf. His boot heels echoed throughout the hush of the archives. At least Friyr hoped the ginger and tan blur was Sahley; this would get very awkward very quickly, if it wasn’t.
“I dabble on occasion,” a masculine but ultimately tender voice murmured.
Friyr smiled, the scars on the sides of his mouth tensed with the motion.
“I do too; when I can get someone to read to me.”
Sahley let the archives speak for him a second. Friyr could hear holos humming into the dusty silence. Tython held ages, and Sahley held Friyr’s attention in that pause. Something about the softness of his character was novel and enrapturing. Even his silences. “Well some people say that droids are a ‘someone’ too, though I understand that the human to interface connection isn’t quite the same.”
Friyr’s smile widened.
“Georgie is a someone, but he don’t really like reading.”
“That’s a shame.” Sahley paused a beat. “I like reading.”
__
Friyr braced his back against Sahley’s chest. He could feel the trunk of the tree through the terseness in the other man’s form and the way his body moved to compensate for its shape. The Mirialan’s legs splayed on either side of him. Friyr used his left shin as a perch for his ankle, occasionally scuffing the top of the man’s boots with his sole. Sahley pushed back, his lips puffing bitten back laughs against Friyr’s hair.
His spine curved into the broader man’s shape, rising and falling with his shortened breaths. As he sank into the weight, he sank into a memory where he was braced the same way against another person. His hands rested on top of a claw tracing the lines for him as he read. Kurt had been dreadfully concerned that his slave couldn’t read. He found that it was impossible for Friyr to read with his eyes after more than one strenuous test that slave had been forced to humor the little boy through. Kurt’s decision to save Friyr from the tyranny of a hololess life was that he would simply have to recount these magical stories to Friyr.
The stories he was read were pilfered from his mother’s library of blackmarket books for “research” purposes. These had been Kurt’s favorites. They often confused and frustrated Friyr who bit his tongue about why a such things would happen, the practicality about reading stories of things that had never, could never, and would never happen. He preferred listening to Lord Ignolis read the holonews.
But it was through books that Friyr had, in his middling child years - where he was neither adult nor child – discovered a ruthless gentleness in his master, Kurt Wax. He was soft, sensitive, idealistic as much as he was spoiled and wicked. And in turn, Friyr had pushed Kurt’s cogs with stray statements, quiet enthusiasm, and holos. Though… he could not read them.
Friyr blinked the Pureblood from his sightless eyes and listened to Sahley’s soothing tone form around the words. His free arm rested idly around Friyr’s waist so he could set his “injured” arm upon it. His thumbnail picked over the edges of a burn on Friyr’s arm as the rest of his fingers fell limp around the scarred Jedi’s waist. It was as though they were pointing out the absurdity of someone like Friyr sitting under a tree. A tireless warrior pausing to draw breath.
“’I love three things,’ I then say. ‘I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.’
‘And which do you love best?’
‘The dream.’
Friyr hated this book too. Deeply detested it.
“This is an awful lot about love for a Jedi to be reading. One might think you’re pining.”
“I—oh, I—” Sahley stammered. His gentle voice offset with surprise. “Pining is perhaps a strong word.”
Friyr grinned as he caught the man in a secret Friyr didn’t know he’d been keeping. He found himself curious, but Sahley wasn’t a toy to pry at. He was gentle. Sensitive. Honest. Sahley had grown from sheltered into a man trying to make sense of the galaxy, and though Friyr often thought he might be wrong, Friyr thought there was something nice about it. Part of Friyr wished to respect that though he didn’t understand that.
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t fault you for missing your attachments. Or longing for a more normal life.”
Sahley sighed though his thumb continued picking.
“I don’t read books about exploring love because I miss it, Friyr. It’s because there’s just something… Nice about the sentiment. I read them probably because I am a Jedi and was taught to find compassion in many places others do not.”
Friyr thought about that a moment, listening to birds and the quiet lap of water. “I didn’t know we were by a stream.”
“… We aren’t. We’re hm…” Sahley’s head turned to inspect the lawn. “A little ways from the Temple in the middle of the lawn but closer to the left edge under a fringe of trees. There are the same padawans from when we came practicing the Force on a large outcrop of rock.”
“Oh.”
Friyr listened to tides lapping on the shore, a sound which seemed to emanate from Sahley’s chest, and he accepted it for what it was. So many things had been strange, since he had become one of those strange things. His chest fluttered with a frantic but pleasurable feeling as Saley described the scene to him in as detailed language as he could muster. The holo staticed as Sahley set it off to take Friyr’s right hand and outstretch it with his own. His callouses were rough against Friyr’s burn scars, the palms wide and smooth from laboring under a lightsaber’s handle.
“The Temple is that direction.”
Friyr threaded his long fingers through Sahley’s. “I don’t really know much about these books that didn’t happen. People say they read things for no reason, but I guess I’m still not getting that.”
“People read for a reason. Just maybe—not because they’re missing something. Not all the time.”
Sahley kept their hands threaded as he folded their arms back to their sides, laying with the wrists pressed against the ground.
Friyr nodded and wished he could understand him the way he understood a lightsaber. There was a barrier between him and other Jedi. The Jedi like Ven Zallow. A barrier that Friyr found he was unable to dissolve, one that would always be there. That was okay. In some way, Friyr hoped he never truly understood Sahley but rather took the young Jedi with him in memory. Star ships passing in the night briefly with their lights on. Because as long as Sahley was hopeful and idealistic, if he survived, kept a good head on his shoulders, maybe he’d soften the galaxy too the way he did a former Sith’s resolve. There was something special about that.
“I don’t think Jedi really miss love when they get like that anyway.”
“Get like what?” he could hear the confused furrow in Sahley’s voice.
“All empty, all their inside emotions scooped outta them. They seem very serene… like nothing could touch them. … I wonder what does that?”
Sahley stayed quiet. Friyr could hear the padawans on the rock.
“I don’t think they miss much of anything when they’re like that, no. I don’t think they miss anything at all, but in a way they’re missing everything.” Sahley laughed quietly at his own witticism. Friyr wanted to ask him to explain it; the statement was divulged from Sahley’s internals and phrased around a complex wordl view Friyr wasn’t privy to, but instead he untwined their fingers, the tips of him buzzing with numbness from the position.
They put themselves through Sahley’s hair and bent his head down to meet Friyr’s mouth, though blindness and the spontaneity of the movement left Sahley’s lips against Friyr’s chin and his on the serious bridge of Sahley’s nose.
They paused, Friyr’s eyelashes fluttering against Sahley’s cheek before the Mirialan burst into another quiet fit of giggles as he kissed Friyr’s chin and then properly his mouth.
Friyr hefted the sack of feed over his good shoulder and waited for his ‘deficiencies’ to catch up. It was almost dusk, and the light waned low but still bright. On Kaas, it would’ve been pitch by now, but Ambria was merely a filtered low gray. Friyr didn’t depend on sight anymore than a Miraluka did. The dirt smelled pungent from the heat rapidly cooling the sand as though bringing out the smell of the musty underlayers. It coated his nose and made it dry. He carried grain into the storage sheds, while dragging his limp left foot in a trail behind him. The instep pressed into the dirt, which wedged into a clod in his sandal. It made the connection between his hip to his knee to the ground firmer than if he tried to support it on a flat sole.
Water lapped in his ears, and the oro-birds’ racous clucking settled into a murmur. Nights on Ambria were silent. Friyr knelt onto on knee and heaved the bag forward over his shoulder, almost going prostrate as he used his full body for what would’ve taken only the upper arms for a normal man.
“I can’t do it yet, Master.”
Elutherius’ skin burned. He didn’t need sight to know his wrists were a raw red, blistered bubbling on the surface of a red tattoo shaped into the Imperial seal. The palms of both of his hands felt raw where the edges of the lightsaber pressed into his skin. He resisted the urge to manacle his hands around them and rub the ache away.
“Look at me.”
Elutherius lifted his head in the gray darkness to the hulking silhouette.
“Look at me.”
Elutherius closed his eyes, pulled the weariness from his bones, like Quirt had asked just one more thing of him on an already bone-weary day, and drew in a shaking draught of Force.
When he opened them, his vision flickered blearily between the lines of blindness and unnatural sight that the rods and cones should never have been capable of. Blurred watercolor blended with sharp seven feet lines of wine-dark Massassi.
Elutherius met the yellow eyes.
“Good, Apprentice. Explain why you can’t.”
His Master’s tone was sharp. Businesslike. Urgent.
Elutherius was seventeen, though he looked younger than that.
“I need a smoother grip to fit my hands and—” Elutherius pulled his shirt up without a lingering trace of shyness for his body. He caught a glance at his hard but gawky teenage muscles fit on a slender frame still filling out and at the same time losing the last bits of babyfat clinging to the Korriban sinew. He was smooth. Pale. New blemishes of spotty brown freckled over his stomach and shoulders but they were healing into peeling skin. A few, very few pink scars traced what had been deep scabby gashes over his ribs. They caved in as though broken and unset in healing, like his face. A warped dip.
“—and this. This hurts when I move. It makes it harder to do.”
The Massassi gazed at him a few seconds, and Elutherius met it unabashed. He took out his lightsaber and flipped it in his broad, thick, four fingered claws. “Apprentice.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
“When I ask for an explanation, I expect it to be one we can both work with to overcome. Do I look like a medic?”
“No, my Lord.”
The Massassi turned on his lightsaber and raked a line down Friyr’s ribs with the tip. A loud sound filled the Apprentice’s ears. It was elegant really, like drawing a red strike through in pen that severed only cloth and cooking muscle but not bone.
Elutherius collapsed to his knees, registering that the sound was him screaming, and he lurched forward onto his hands, feeling his torso sag below his trembling shoulders and his Lord unkitted him. The heat built in a flash, never relenting, and it was only until his chest hit the floor, that he realized his Master had stabbed the lightsaber into his side, wrapping the wounded parts of him from the front of his the chest to the backs of his shoulders in a searing band.
“Give me an explanation,” Elutherius made out as tears fogged his eyes and the unnatural vision dissipated with them, but rather writhed within him as his tried to admit defeat. To curl up.
“I can do it I can do it I can I can--!”
The red beam retracted from the side of his vision, and everything went dark.
“I can do… it.”
“Good. Then get up and do it.”
Elutherius pushed himself to his feet, black eating the edges of his vision. Hearing began to turn from solid sounds, to faint liquid echoes. He fell again, smacking his chin on the metal of the landing pad. Something cracked. He tasted blood.
“There is a penalty for making me empty promises, Apprentice.”
Elutherius fought for consciousness. To stand before he was punished, but the lightsaber flared, and he felt the burn as more of him cauterized against his will, his helplessness used against him. This time. This time. He knew the screams were his own.
The shed was cool. Dark. Empty. Friyr slid his fingers under his shirt. He couldn’t feel much through the smooth scars in either his hand or side. A faint pressure of five tips, but—nothing more. Lord Ignolis couldn’t hurt nerve endings he’d permanently burned away. Friyr traced that absence methodically until his knees protested against the rough wooden floor. He staggered to his feet using the wall.
He dropped his hand from under his shirt and sighed. In time he’d learned through struggling and curling on the ground how to fight back, and eventually the Force buoyed him to his feet. Wicked and dark. There had been many more punishments.
Some of them had been his own errors, as he threw the debilitated side forward, letting people carve him because the scarred tissue was that thick. Their throats constricted in fear because he could take it. Without that he was just… Friyr flexed his arm into a curl and felt the deep current of numbness run down it. He suspected a muscle in his shoulder had been cut, but he couldn’t be sure.
Without the Force, Friyr was disabled. His ability had always been achy, limited, and he’d enjoyed building his strength past what people expected. He’d enjoyed getting stronger, but not by feeding on the Force. Not like this. No amount of muscle or hard work would fix the permanence of this.
Friyr left the shed and locked it up. He locked the Oro-bird coops. He heard the crunch of the dry dirt and the drag of his other foot through it. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. Not about that. He’d find a way. He always did.
“If you work with me, I’ll work with you, Teran! That’s all I ask! Kriff, I won’t even fight you about the med bay anymore!”
Friyr stopped outside his shed and looked up at the sky. It was a filtered gray pink that hurt his eyes.
When Teran had left, Friyr had expected it. His days on Tython had been sunlit and lonely as any Jedi milling around the half-bombed out temple had avoided him. Teran said he suspected Friyr was his purpose, that he’d had a feeling. Friyr, of course, had learned not to trust people a long time ago. They always had their own ends, even types like the Jedi that clung to altruism. They just didn’t realize what their own ends were.
But a feeling. Friyr trusted the Force, if not the headstrong, cocky, acrobatic-obsessed, young Jedi – who preferred to dance among the stars, rather than spend time with his Padawan on the ground. That was—fine. It was supposed to have been fine because Friyr didn’t trust people with red-hair and a way-ward temper because they loved falling into that stereotype.
Friyr snorted. Everybody knew the one.
But Teran had left a sizable hole, that Friyr had stumbled through into freefall. Stupidly trying to control his decent. People didn’t stick around. Jedi were afraid with people touched by darkness. It was stupid to trust that he’d stay, and Friyr didn’t expect As’traa to either. She needed the encouragement that she could do this more than he needed to know that she’d fail him as a Master.
She’d get him a new lightsaber; he’d understand what the hullabaloo was about, and he could ask questions along the way. She’d get what she wanted; Friyr wouldn’t have to form another…attachment.
“I liked Tython, but I knew too that was an attachment.”
Friyr had a smaller trail of people who had abandoned him, died, or had used him than most. Most dragged trains of flesh and tears behind them, but that didn’t make it easy for him to maintain.
Slavery was a hard profession. He’d learned how to serve someone without being too invested, to separate his thoughts form his work, to find moments of acceptable pleasure and indulge them while remaining impartial.
“It is control of your emotions Jedi emphasize not…not having them at all.”
“Slaves too, Lockham; slaves too,” Friyr sighed and let a warm wind carry his words away.
“This is… problematic for some. Like yourself, I suspect.”
When Friyr was around fourteen, he had fallen in love with a boy. Probably the second one he could remember loving. When Friyr was fourteen, he’d been a slave. When Friyr was fourteen, he already knew his chances were nil. His ability to desire, love, crave affection were broken in by the training he’d voluntarily submitted to and the years of service, since before he’d started losing teeth. Since he was a child with no food. It had been a wise decision, and it remained one. Slaves didn’t feel love at the same luxury that everyone else did. When people held food, comfort, and liberty over ones head, they fell victim to affection, false ploys of tenderness, and that was why Friyr had been a good slave. A clever one. Because he knew about this weakness, not because he’d been above it.
He balanced himself, he gained footing in the political game by using his master. When he’d fallen in love, he’d dealt with it. Managed it. When he’d became a Sith. Well…
He watched that boy grow into a man, Apprenticed under his father, and the future of having a title, land, a future beyond a well-fed death under someone else’s servitude was finally his; it had been all he’d ever wanted. As a Sith, he’d allowed himself, finally, the small luxury of uncalculating an emotion never meant for an equation. He’d allowed himself to soften control. He’d allowed himself not just indulgence of love but indulgence to create lasting connections beyond his own benefit.
Elutherius couldn’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday. Most people forgot most errant things, such as lunches. But then again, Elutherius hadn’t remembered anything for a long time except the voice of the Force, painful and beautiful in paradox, she shifted between acerbic mocking tones, paragraphs crusted in old blood, hungry pleads for fresh wounds, and soft decay. It was hard to hear anything else when she filled Elutherius’ head, drifting into different pitches as easily as a kaleidoscope did patterns. He felt compelled to listen to these echoes that had no true sound or language, deriving his life by the echoes of what might be his own mortality.
She spoke often about that in ways he heard clearly, like darkness pressing in on his eyes. She spoke about the end of things, and he understood the way the words fell from her lips like so much rot. If only because, latently, he was included in it. It was as though someone had locked eyes with him, while speaking on something otherwise innocuous seeming to the room at whole. All things worldly came to an end, but Elutherius had a sinking feeling she watched him in particular. The way scavengers did men on their way to death.
The world…sort of passed by. He listened, but he was unconscious of his own role in it. One day phasing from a moment of clarity in a towering mansion of cold metal the next across town and shivering in the middle of a warm rainfall having a familiar conversation.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said. Again.
Rivulets of grease ran down her face. Elutherius watched the trails through the yellow incandescence of his unnaturally lit and unnaturally sighted eyes. Dead eyes. He appreciated the detail, even if it was something so unappealing such as filth from an unwashed slave just finished her duties.
The balcony railing pressed into his forearms as they leaned against it, staring out into the dark silhouettes of thick foliage and canopy watching taxis go by to avoid looking at each other. The city dropped below.
Elutherius’ lips, heavily scarred from the trenches he’d carved into them, stretched into a warm smile that made him look severely aged rather than a walking blight.
“You’re so—” A shock of lightening darted through the thick clouds and cast Elutherius’ wasting broken face into light. Her eyes cast down on reflex.
Elutherius cleared his throat; his light golden robes swayed in the breeze. “I’ve looked better.”
The young woman gave him a soft smile. “I’m just glad you’re home.”
Elutherius glanced around at the outside of the Mandolorian Enclave, remembering the cold of the slave quarters at night with a strange fondness. It was a relief to have something so distant as an overworked cooling system stir something in him that awkardness of lumping the heir to a legacy with anything as trivial as a slave passed him by.
“The times I feel clear are fewer and further in between,” he said to a pane of grey. The rain knocked sharply on the full-length glass and the metal. It sounded a little like living in a tin can with thick insulation. The Mandolarian Enclave had been last week. Elutherius ran the memory through again over the fading whisper of the Force, but he found he couldn’t remember anything before Danara welcoming him home.
“Small price for ruling the world.” Was what she’d said next, but Elutherius couldn’t remember his response. Or even having existed past that point. It had something to do with him having been made Sith from the workings of a slave, no doubt. Or maybe it was having been made a slave from the workings of a Sith. To the Sith? He had been enslaved to the Sith, but that didn’t seem right.
What had she said again?
His head grew louder until the memory was eaten by both sides, and he felt himself expand into a sea of voices that connected the galaxy. He hummed to the tune they seemed to be pattering out and tried to cup his thoughts in his hands.
It was time to unlearn that.
He didn’t remember who he had been. Continued through numb routines. Friyr edged around the back of the Oro-bird coops until his feet smacked softly against wood. He and Sahley had sat there earlier. This anger wasn’t normal. This loss of memory wasn’t normal. This depersonalization wasn’t normal.
Sahley felt normal. He was down to earth, and sad. Quiet. He was interested. He sounded like Friyr’s age in timbre, and boy did his body certainly feel and respond to Friyr’s like it was thirty something. He was cricked, starting to develop aches….but pleasantly pliant. Falling out of youngness, but he was still so young.
He was an idealist. He believed in hope and thought Friyr was interesting because he was covered in scars, and talked openly about hardships like they were nothing. It attracted him, he listened. Friyr felt like a person when drawing the Mirialan in. Because Sahley let himself be controlled and wowed by someone who seemed as world-weary as he was.
“I realized too that was an attachment.”
If Friyr tried hard enough he could become red, down to earth, quiet, and sad while barking orders because someone else was somewhere in the Empire. For once he understood what he had felt like at fourteen. Perhaps thirteen. He remembered that balance. He remembered keeping people at a comfortable distance, while also serving in perhaps sensitive ways. He understood that he couldn’t stop people. He couldn’t break Force bonds. But he could handle his attachments, and he could let them float away on the wind.
Friyr was good at duty, he was good at serving. It had taken a long time to beat down the frantic angry Sith who forgot that.
