Nightbloom
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this is a bit of an angsty one, ending with fluff - that's my favorite category to read and write woo!
So'lek's mate is kidnapped by the RDA while gathering herbs, used as bait to lure him in. He rescues her, tends to her recovery, and they rebuild in a new hidden home together. Ends soft and sweet
TWs: kidnapping, interrogation, non-graphic torture, a device used on a kuru - read at your own discretion
words: 5,581 this is proofread!
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The morning had the particular quality of mornings that don’t know what they’re about to become.
Soft, warm, and unhurried. The kind that arrived gently on Pandora. The light filtering down through the canopy in long pale shafts that moved slowly across the floor of the home as the sun climbed. The sounds of the forest coming awake around the kelku in layers — first the birds, then the insects, then the deeper resonance of the root network humming its slow, ancient frequency beneath everything.
You had been up before So’lek, which was unusual. He was a light sleeper by habit and long practice. The kind of man whose body had learned to surface at the smallest change in the room, and so it was rare that you moved through the early morning without waking him.
But today he slept deeply, the lines of his face smoothed out in a way they rarely were when he was conscious, and you had lain beside him for a long time watching that — the specific unguarded quality of him in sleep, the way he looked younger, the way the weight he carried everywhere lifted from him in the dark — before you had finally, carefully, slipped out of the hammock without disturbing him.
He had been pushing hard lately. Three facilities in two weeks, each one further than the last. The resistance was stretched thin, and the RDA was pushing back in ways that meant So’lek came home with new bruises layered over the old ones and the particular exhausted set to his jaw that told you he had folded up more than usual on the journey back.
You learned to read him the way the forest read the weather — in the small signs before the thing itself arrived. The way he held his shoulders. The careful way he lowered himself to sit when something was hurting that he wasn’t going to mention. The quality of his silence, which had many different textures and which you mapped over years of loving him until you could tell the contented ones from the ones that needed tending.
He needed tending lately. He always did, he never said so, and you long since stopped waiting for him to say so.
The salve was running low. You mentioned it to him the night before, briefly, the way you mentioned practical things — not as a complaint or a request, simply as an observation. The quiet inventory of someone who was always thinking three steps ahead about what was needed.
He nodded and said he would gather the kxania root himself on the next hunt to save you the trip. You smiled, said of course and privately decided you would go in the morning while he slept because the next hunt could be days away and his shoulder was not improving on its own.
You packed your gathering satchel quietly in the grey pre-dawn light. You left a small bundle of his favorite dried fruit where he would find it when he woke, arranged in the particular way you arranged things when you wanted him to know you had been thinking of him while you did it. You slipped out into the early morning forest and let the door close softly behind you.
The path was familiar. You walked it enough times that your feet knew it without consultation. The particular placement of roots and stones mapped in your body the way the constellations were mapped in your mind — not consciously, just known.
The forest was luminous and cool at this hour, the bioluminescence still visible in the lower growth where the morning light hadn’t yet reached, and you moved through it with the easy, unhurried pace of someone who learned to belong in a place.
You were thinking about So’lek’s shoulder. The left one, which he favored less than usual lately and which he had deflected from twice when you’d tried to look at it properly. You were thinking about the best approach — whether to simply begin treating it while he was distracted, which sometimes worked, or to address it directly and wait out the mild resistance before he allowed you to help, which also sometimes worked and took longer.
You were thinking about this with the focused, gentle strategy of someone who had made a long study of caring for a man who did not always know how to be cared for. You were not thinking about the forest around you, or the distance you had covered, or the fact that you had, gradually and without noticing, moved further from the kelku than you usually went alone.
You found the nightbloom first. A cluster of them growing in the crook of a fallen tree where the moisture collected, exactly what you needed. You crouched to harvest them with careful hands, turning each one to check the bloom before adding it to your satchel with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this many times.
You found the kxania root a little further along. And then, further still, the particular grey-green moss that you used as a base for the wound paste that So’lek went through fastest.
You were reaching for it when you heard the sound.
Not the forest. Not anything that belonged here.
You straightened slowly. Turned.
The clearing behind you was not empty.
—
So’lek woke to an empty hammock and lay still for a moment, reading the quality of the absence before he opened his eyes.
Not wrong. Just empty. The particular emptiness of someone who had risen carefully rather than been taken, the hammock still holding the warmth of you on the side where you slept, the kelku carrying the small sounds of morning rather than the sounds of disturbance.
He opened his eyes. Looked at the ceiling. Listened to the forest coming awake outside and the absence of you inside and understood, without urgency, that you had gone out.
He sat up. Found the dried fruit on the mat beside the hammock where you had left it — arranged in the particular way you arranged things when you wanted him to know you had been thinking of him while you did it — and held it in his hand for a moment before he ate it slowly, looking at the stacked containers near the fire.
The salve. You mentioned it last night, briefly, the way you mentioned practical things. Running low. He had said he would gather the kxania root himself on the next hunt to save you the trip. He thought that settled it.
He almost smiled. You had not waited.
He rose. Moved to the door of the kelku and looked out at the morning forest, pale and cool and luminous at this hour, and thought that you were probably not far. That you knew these paths as well as anyone, that you would be back before the morning was properly underway with your satchel full, your hair catching on things and some new observation about something you had seen on the path that you would tell him over the morning meal with the particular enthusiasm you brought to the world that he never once found excessive, only extraordinary.
He made tea. He began his morning tasks. He kept one ear toward the path.
—
The transmission came through two hours later.
Teylan’s voice, urgent and clipped, the particular register that meant something had moved faster than expected. A facility north of the mountain range, a signal the resistance had been tracking for days that had suddenly gone active. Equipment being moved. A window of hours before it closed.
So’lek listened to the transmission data with the focused attention he brought to all intelligence. The coordinates verified. The source confirmed through Priya’s secondary check. The signal consistent with RDA operational patterns he had encountered before.
He had been uneasy from the first word. He learned, over years of this work, to trust the feeling — the particular quality of alertness that arrived in his chest before his mind had caught up with the reason for it. He turned the data over twice, looking for the thing that was prickling at him, and found nothing.
He tried your frequency before he left. No answer, which meant you were still out on the path, still gathering, your communication piece left at the kelku the way you sometimes left it when you went close to home. He left a message. He told himself he would be back before you were.
He had been three hours out when he found the facility.
Empty. Not recently evacuated — empty in the way of a space that had never been properly occupied, a shell of infrastructure with nothing inside it, no equipment, no personnel, no evidence of the operation the signal described. Constructed well enough to pass initial verification and nothing more, intended to be found and found quickly. To send whoever found it somewhere very far from where they needed to be.
The unease became something that had no adequate name.
So’lek was already moving before he fully processed the thought.
—
He tried your frequency first, running back through the forest - flat out, every resource committed to speed, the forest floor blurring beneath him. No answer. He tried again. The silence on the line had a quality to it that was different from a simple failure to connect, a texture he recognized and refused to name.
He tried Teylan.
“The signal was false,” he said, when Teylan answered. Not a question.
A beat of silence. “So’lek —”
“Where is she.” The words came out with the particular flatness of someone who has moved past the register of normal speech into something that runs deeper and colder. “Where is my mate.”
“We’re looking,” Teylan said carefully. “There may have been a breach in the network. Someone found a thread we thought was scrubbed — a record we believed was gone. So’lek, we think they’ve had this planned. The false signal was designed to move you. The timing —”
“How long since you lost her frequency.”
A pause that told him everything before Teylan said: “Two hours.”
So’lek said nothing. He ran.
—
He found the satchel first.
It was lying at the edge of the path, half open, the nightbloom scattered around it in the way that spoke of sudden movement, of something set down fast or knocked loose rather than placed. He stopped beside it, crouched and looked at it for a moment with an expression that no one was there to see, which was perhaps fortunate.
Your gathering knife was three feet further along. Still in its sheath, which meant you hadn’t had time to reach for it.
He picked both up. Set them carefully inside the satchel. Closed it and held it in his hands for a moment before he made himself set it down against the base of a tree where it would be safe, where he could find it again, where he could bring it back to you.
He stood.
The forest around him was as it always was — luminous and vast and entirely indifferent to the thing that had happened in it. The bioluminescence pulsed at the roots of the trees. The canopy moved in the high wind.
So’lek stood in the path where your things had fallen and let himself feel, for exactly the span of three measured breaths, the full specific terror of what he was feeling. He did not look away from it. He let it move through him entirely, catalogued it, understood it, and then he folded it up — not small, not the way he folded up the small daily frustrations, but differently. The way you folded something you needed to carry a long distance without losing — and he set his jaw and opened his transmission to Teylan.
“Find her,” he said. “Now.”
—
It took Teylan forty minutes and it was the RDA’s own transmission network that found you.
“They moved her between units,” Teylan said, his voice tight with the controlled urgency of someone managing multiple things at once. “Internal frequency, encrypted but not well enough. We intercepted the relay. So’lek — we have coordinates.”
“Send them.”
“Already done.” A pause. “There’s something else. They transmitted to your personal frequency. Deliberately. They want you to see it before you go in.”
So’lek was already moving. “Send it.”
“I don’t think —”
“Teylan.” One word. The tone beneath it left no room.
A beat. Then the transmission came through to his device, and he slowed to a stop in the forest and he watched it.
Forty seconds.
The interior of a small room. You, restrained, your wrists bound above you, your kuru exposed and vulnerable in a way that made the breath leave his body in a slow controlled exhale that was the only outward indication of what it cost him to keep watching. The RDA operative’s voice, sharp and demanding, asking you something you were not answering. The device in his hand. What it did when he used it. The sound you made in response — the sound that came from somewhere below the composure you had been holding onto, involuntary and small and entirely honest about what was being done to you, the kind of sound you would never have made if you had known he was watching.
The transmission cut out.
So’lek stood in the forest with the device in his hand and was very, very still in a way that was not stillness at all but its shadow — the shape stillness left behind when everything inside it had become something else entirely.
“So’lek.” Teylan’s voice, careful and distant. “They sent it to provoke you. To make you go in reckless. She needs you to go in with a clear head. You hear me?”
He stood there for another moment.
“I hear you,” he said. His voice was even. What was underneath it was something he was going to have to manage very carefully for the next hour or it was going to make him dangerous in ways that would not serve you.
He started running again.
—
The RDA facility was smaller than most — a forward outpost rather than a full installation. The kind that appeared quickly and disappeared quickly and existed for specific purposes rather than long occupation. It sat in a depression in the landscape where the trees thinned, ringed with perimeter lighting that So’lek had disabled from three separate installations before this one and disabled again now without breaking his stride.
He went in from the east. He went in alone, which Teylan had argued against and which So’lek had not argued back about because there was nothing to say. There was only the facility and the forty seconds of transmission and your satchel sitting at the base of a tree in the forest waiting to be brought home.
He moved through the first two rooms without stopping.
And then he heard you.
He was in the second corridor, moving toward the third room, when the sound reached him through the wall — the RDA operative’s voice, sharp and demanding, asking you something you were not answering, and then the device, and then the sound you made, and it came through the wall and hit him somewhere below thought entirely.
It got louder with every step.
Your voice, strained and ragged, still refusing to give them what they wanted. The operative’s voice, harder now, less patient. The device again. The sound you couldn’t stop making no matter how hard you were trying not to make it, and So’lek could hear that you were trying. Could hear the effort of it in every breath, and that — that specific detail, the sound of you fighting to hold yourself together while they used that thing on the most sacred part of you — was the last thing that reached him before he stopped being able to hear anything except the door in front of him.
He went through it.
The room. Two operatives. You, restrained, your head down, your kuru bearing the marks of what had been done to it, the device still in one of their hands. So’lek registered all of it in a fraction of a second and then he stopped registering things the way a thinking person registers things and began operating on something considerably more fundamental.
He was not counting. He was not calculating. He was not the controlled, methodical, tactically precise fighter that the resistance knew and that the RDA had learned to be afraid of. He was something older than all of that and considerably less interested in restraint. The room was small and there were two of them and neither of them was prepared for what came through that door.
He was still moving when it was over. Still somewhere the rational mind had no useful contribution to make. His breathing hard and ragged in a way it almost never was. The forty seconds playing behind his eyes and the sounds from the corridor still living in his ears and his hands —
A sound.
Small. Involuntary. From across the room where you were still restrained, a sound that was not fear of what he had just done, but something physical. The echo of pain still moving through you in the aftermath of everything that had preceded him into this room.
It reached him like a hand on his shoulder.
He stopped.
He turned.
You were looking at him. Your eyes clear despite everything — despite the exhaustion and the hours of it and the marks on your kuru and whatever it had cost you to hold yourself together in this room without breaking — and you were looking at him with an expression that he would carry for the rest of his life because it was not fear. Not of him, not of any of this. It was relief, enormous and uncontrolled, and underneath it something steady and certain that had apparently never wavered.
“So’lek,” you said. Quietly. Just his name.
He crossed to you. His hands, which had been something else entirely thirty seconds ago, were gentle on the restraints. Careful. Deliberate. He freed your wrists and caught your arms as they came down and held them with the same focused attention he brought to tending your injuries, to anything that involved you — the care that lived in him for you specifically and expressed itself differently than anything else in his life.
“I have you,” he said. Low and certain. More to himself than to you.
“I knew you’d come,” you said. Your voice was hoarse and small, nothing like its usual self.
He looked at your kuru. At the marks on it. And the thing that had been running hot in him since the forty second transmission did something complicated and quiet. He closed his eyes for a single moment before he opened them again and looked at your face instead and held onto that.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He picked you up anyway.
—
He carried you out of the facility and through the perimeter and into the forest with the particular focused deliberateness of a man who was doing one thing only and that thing was getting you away from there and he was not going to put you down until you were somewhere safe.
Behind him, at a distance he had communicated to Teylan before he went in, the facility ceased to exist.
He didn’t look back.
—
He found a place in the forest, far enough from the outpost, where the roots of a great tree formed a natural shelter and the bioluminescence was strong enough to see by, and he sat down with you still in his arms and he held on.
You were quiet for a long time. He could feel you shaking, finely and continuously. The kind of shaking that came from hours of fear finally finding somewhere to go, and he held you through it and said nothing because there was nothing to say yet. He understood that what you needed right now was not words but this — his arms, and his heartbeat, and the specific irreplaceable certainty of him, solid and present and not going anywhere.
Eventually the shaking eased.
“They knew who I was,” you said. Very quietly. Into the space between his jaw and his shoulder.
“I know,” he said.
“They knew about you. They said —” You stopped.
“You don’t have to tell me now.”
“I want to.” A breath. “They said they would keep taking things from you until you stopped. That you should have understood there were consequences.” Another stop. “They said that you would come for me and they were right and I was so — So’lek, I was so frightened that you would walk into something.”
He pressed his mouth to the top of your head. Held it there.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m whole. You’re whole.” His arms tightened. “That is the only thing that matters right now.”
You were quiet for a moment.
“My kuru,” you said, and your voice was different on those words, something in it that was not quite the physical pain but something adjacent to it. Something that lived deeper.
“I know,” he said. Low and careful and carrying everything he felt about that in a way that he was choosing very deliberately not to put into full words right now because you did not need his fury, you needed his steadiness, and he was going to give you his steadiness even if it cost him something to do it. “I’m going to tend to it. As soon as we’re home.”
“You should let me tend to yours first,” you said. “Your shoulder has been —”
“No,” he said. Simply. Firmly. With the absolute finality of a man who was not going to be argued with on this particular point.
“So’lek —”
“No,” he said again, gentler.
You didn’t argue. You tucked your face back against his neck and breathed slowly and he held you in the shelter of the great tree and the forest moved around you both in the dark and neither of you said anything else for a long time.
—
He didn’t sleep that night.
You did, eventually — exhaustion pulling you under despite everything, your body making the decision that your mind might not have, and he lay beside you in the dark and listened to your breathing. He kept his hand light and careful near your kuru without touching it, looked at the ceiling, and thought.
He thought about the forty seconds of transmission. He thought about the marks on your kuru. He thought about the sound you had made in the corridor getting louder with every step he took toward the room and the way you had been fighting to hold yourself together in there and the specific quality of your voice saying I knew you’d come with such steadiness, such certainty, as though the possibility that he wouldn’t had never entered your mind.
He thought about the satchel in the forest path. The nightbloom scattered around it.
He had known there was risk. He had always known. The resistance work, the facilities, the name the RDA had given him — he had known that name meant something. That it painted a target; the space around him was more dangerous than the space around others. He had believed he had protected you from that. He had believed the precautions were sufficient.
He had been wrong.
That wrong had a weight and a specific shape and he was going to sit with it until he understood its full dimensions, because that was what he did with the things that mattered — he looked at them clearly, without the mercy of distance or the comfort of partial understanding, and he let them be what they were.
You stirred at some point in the deep of the night, found him awake and said nothing. Just reached for his hand and held it. He turned his palm up and held yours in return, and the night moved slowly around you both.
—
The days that followed had a texture he had not experienced before.
Not the texture of grief — you were here, you were healing, every hour that passed was an hour further from what had happened and closer to you being whole. Not the texture of fear, which had its own particular quality he knew well. Something else. Something quieter and more persistent, something that sat in him at a low level all the time and that he had to move around carefully the way you moved around a bruise — not ignoring it, not pressing on it directly, just aware of its location at all times.
He did not leave. He said he wouldn’t, and he didn’t, and there was no discussion about it because it was simply what was happening. The way weather simply happened.
He tended your kuru with the same focused care you brought to his injuries, which he understood was not a coincidence — that you taught him this without meaning to, by example, by the years of quiet, attentive healing you had offered him without making him ask for it. He learned the particular way you needed it handled, the pressure and the angle, and the specific warmth that helped. He brought that same careful attention to it every time with the focused dedication of someone who understood that what had been done to this part of you was not only physical and needed to be met accordingly.
He made your meals and brought them to you and sat beside you while you ate and did not hover but was always within reach — the presence without the pressure, the availability without the demand. You taught him that too, in the early days, by being exactly that for him.
You slept a great deal. Your body was doing the work of recovery, and he left it to that work without interfering. Lying still beside you during the long afternoon sleeps, listening to the forest, thinking.
On the third day you said: “You’re blaming yourself.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I failed to protect you.”
“The RDA laid a trap,” you said. “Specifically designed to move you away from me. That is not a failure of your protection. That is them being willing to do anything.”
“I missed something in the intelligence.”
“Teylan missed it. Priya missed it. The entire resistance network missed it.” You looked at him steadily. “And you are sitting here deciding it was yours alone to have caught.”
He looked at you. Said nothing.
“So’lek.” Your voice, gentle and absolutely certain. “Hear me. What happened to me was not a consequence of your choices. It was a consequence of theirs. They chose to do what they did. The responsibility for it belongs to them entirely.” A pause. “You came for me. That is what I will remember. You came and you were —” Something moved across your face. “The look on your face when you came through that door. I will remember that every day of my life.”
He looked at you for a long moment.
Then he reached out and took your hand with the same care he had been bringing to everything involving you since he carried you out of that facility, the specific tenderness of someone who has been reminded, at great cost, exactly what they are holding.
“I will do better,” he said quietly. “With the intelligence. The network. The precautions.”
“I know you will,” you said. “And while you’re doing that —” you turned your hand over in his, “you could also let me tend your shoulder. Which I have been trying to do for two weeks and you have been avoiding.”
A silence.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“It is not fine,” you said pleasantly. “I have been watching you favor it since before the false signal. I have the salve, I have the time, and you are going to sit still and let me help you.”
Another silence. Then, very quietly, with the particular rueful quality of a man who knew when he had been outmaneuvered: “You just recovered from —”
“So’lek.”
He sat still. He let you help him.
And you worked in the quiet together, your hands on his shoulder and his eyes on your face and the forest breathing around the kelku, and it was the most ordinary thing. It was also, in the particular way that ordinary things became extraordinary after you understood what it meant to almost lose them, everything.
—
The move happened ten days later.
Not far — not so far that the work was impossible, that the resistance lost So’lek’s reach entirely. But far enough. Deeper into the forest, further from the known coordinates, into a part of the mountain range where the trees grew thick enough that the canopy blocked aerial surveillance and the root network was so dense that Teylan could reroute the signal through it in ways that left no trace in any direction.
The new kelku was smaller than the old one. Older, built into the base of a tree so ancient that its roots had formed the walls themselves, the wood grown through and around the woven structure over decades until the two were inseparable. It smelled of moss and deep soil and the particular dark sweetness of old wood and it was, in the way of places that had held generations of life inside them, immediately and entirely a home.
So’lek stood in the middle of it on the first evening and looked around at what you had brought with you — the woven things, the containers of salve, his weapons arranged carefully along the root wall the way they always were, your star charts pinned to the interior where you could look at them from the hammock — and felt something in him settle that had been unsettled for ten days.
You appeared at his shoulder. Looked at where he was looking.
“It’s good,” you said.
“Yes,” he said.
A beat of quiet.
“Your satchel,” he said then. He turned to the pack he carried in and withdrew it — your gathering satchel, the one he had found in the forest, which he had carried back and kept in his pack ever since, waiting for the right moment. “I kept it for you.”
You looked at it. Something moved across your face.
“You found it,” you said.
“Yes.”
“When you were —” You stopped. “On the path.”
“Yes.” He held it out. You took it, held it in both hands, and he watched you look at it. He thought about the moment he had found it, your knife beside it in the dirt, and he thought about all the things he had not allowed himself to think about in the weeks since. He let them move through him briefly and completely, then he folded them up and set them down.
You looked up from the satchel and found him watching you.
“The nightbloom is probably past using,” you said softly.
“I gathered more,” he said. “On the way here. I thought you might want to make the salve again.”
You looked at him for a long moment. At this man who had gathered nightbloom on the path to a new home because he knew what you needed before you knew you needed it. Who carried your satchel for ten days because setting it down somewhere else felt wrong. Who stayed awake every night listening to you breathe and held your hand in the dark and had sat still and let you tend his shoulder and had said I will do better with the quiet certainty of someone who meant every word of it and would spend the rest of his life making it true.
“So’lek,” you said softly.
“Mm.”
“Come here.”
He came. You put your arms around him and he folded around you the way he always did — completely, without reservation, with the ease of two people who have learned the precise geometry of each other and no longer have to think about it. His face pressed into your hair. Your face pressed into the curve of his neck. His arms pulled you in and held on with the quiet certainty of someone who had been given something back and was not, not ever, going to take the holding of it for granted again.
Outside, the new forest breathed around the new kelku, ancient and unhurried and entirely its own. The bioluminescence began to strengthen as the evening deepened, finding its way through the old wood walls in faint traces of blue and green, painting the interior of the kelku in the colors that had always meant home to you. That would always mean home to you now, wherever they appeared.
“We’re alright,” you said. Into the warmth of him.
His arms tightened.
“Yes,” he said. His voice low and certain and entirely without qualification. “We are.”
So’lek held you and breathed slowly. Outside, Pandora turned toward dark, and the forest kept its deep indifferent watch over all the small tender things sheltering within it.
And they were, both of them, finally, all the way home.
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