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It struck Kalani, more than once, that Citadel Station ought to have been more densely populated than it was. When Lieutenant Grenn and his subordinates were escorting them from the docking bay to the TSF station, when they were being escorted to the apartment where they were held under house arrest, when they were finally let out (if not given the full run of the station; Grenn wanted them close at hand), she noticed it. There should have been more people living here than they were. She’d heard stories about what had happened to Telos, and had gotten an eyeful of those stories when they were approaching the station. She knew that most of the planetary population had been killed in the bombardment. But she also knew that there had been survivors, that there had been Telosians off-world during the attack.
And if nothing else, Kalani thought with a dull, distant stab of disdain—too weak, but stronger than anything she could have managed a month ago; a month ago, it would have been nothing but apathy—there ought to be more scavengers here, feeding off the remains of a dead world, gorging themselves on the desperation of the survivors. Czerka, sometimes well-meaning, more often predatory, had a presence here. So too did the Exchange, though a—somewhat—quieter one. She’d not seen any more. It was a testament either to Grenn’s dedication, or to just how widely regarded a lost cause Citadel Station—and Telos—was.
Over half of the apartments in their residential area, empty. Thin trickles of people in the common areas where there ought to have been crowds. No children anywhere; no parents willing to invest their children’s futures in this place. Solitude, too easily found. Who knew how long she would be able on to this awareness, how long it would be before her awareness narrowed and dimmed to regarding everything beyond herself as dim shadows, but for now, she saw all too clearly. That was how it always was, unaware or too-aware, with no middle ground. There… was some comfort in shutting her eyes and deafening herself. But so long as the Sith hunted her, Kalani knew it to be a comfort she couldn’t seek.
There were some advantages to the station being so sparsely populated. It was less likely that Kalani would be recognized—someone on Peragus had recognized her as General Kalani Nuna, and look what had come of that. With fewer people around, there was less to pick up on through the Force. Using the Force felt like trying to grasp onto the fraying edges of a cloak as wide as the galaxy itself, reaching only threads that slipped away from her soon enough, and she dared not turn her attention to the planet below again. What little she could pick up on from the people here, much more a reading of body language than through the Force, was an almost universal sense of ambient anxiety, verging on desperation. Kalani didn’t want to think about how strong the impression would be if she could still use the Force as she had a little over ten years ago. When she had first turned her mind to the planet, accidentally, the floor had seemed to tilt, and every step for a while felt like trying to keep her footing walking on a nearly vertical slope. It was like Dxun, like Malachor—screaming with its dead. Kalani might be new to the Force again, but one did not have to be skilled to hear screams.
There was also an advantage, a more straightforward advantage, in that the lines in the cafeteria in the Entertainment District weren’t nearly as long as they could have been.
“Look, all I’m saying is that if her Majesty wants to eat, she ought to move her old bones and get her food herself.”
“Kreia said she wanted to meditate on the Ithorians before we go to meet with them tomorrow,” Kalani argued, as she and Atton tried to find an unoccupied table, booth, bench, anywhere that wasn’t too nearby an occupied spot. The cafeteria was the cheapest place to eat in this part of the station, and was probably the only place that could properly be called crowded. Out of habit, Kalani didn’t want to eat too close to anyone who might eavesdrop, and it seemed that this was a habit of Atton’s, too, since he certainly wasn’t complaining now. “I’m just going to stop by one of the take-out places and pick something up for her. I’m not asking you to come with me.”
“Yeah?” Atton raised an eyebrow at her as if he thought she might be lying. “In that case, I’m gonna hit the cantina. I’ll hold onto a chair for you if you get tired of our ‘friend’s’ company.”
Kalani shook her head. “I’ll pass.”
The defensive note was in Atton’s voice, rather than any sense Kalani got of his emotions. The Force was little more than a half-submerged memory to her, but she never could get so good a grasp on him as on the other people here. His body language was oddly muted, almost deliberately flat. “What, you people look down on drinking?”
Truth be told, the Jedi Order had rather looked down upon drunkenness, deriding the loss of control it represented. But Kalani had not been a Jedi for a long time, and it had been even longer since she had been part of the Order proper. “It’s not that.” She spotted a booth on the far side of the cafeteria from the entry point, far from any occupied tables, and started to make her way towards it. “I can understand needing a stiff drink after what happened on Peragus. It just… doesn’t help. It never has.”
“Seriously?” Now it was amusement she was hearing, laced with an undertone of disbelief. “I knew you can build up a tolerance, but you seriously don’t feel anything at all?”
“It’s not that, either.” Kalani’s mouth twitched in something that in some other galaxy, some other lifetime, might have been a smile. It was a short-lived life form, and it probably would have been more effective if she had been facing Atton for him to see it. “It was just… just part of my training, you know? There are some things you can’t really unlearn.” Even if you can be stripped of the Force. “The amount of alcohol it takes to get me drunk is roughly the amount it takes to put me in the hospital.” And drunkenness wasn’t kind enough to eradicate what she longed to forget.
Atton winced as they sat down. “I can see how that’d be a problem.”
She’d drank, during the war. Kalani had liked the feeling of drinking with her men, even if she couldn’t really get drunk with them. Most of the stuff the soldiers drank on the frontlines tasted like something you could use to clean a starship’s engines—Kalani was definitely drinking more for the company than the taste. There had been something she’d liked, some drink with a flavor pleasant enough for her to have more than one glass of it. But she couldn’t remember what it was, or what it had tasted like. She couldn’t remember the people she’d drank with.
Now, what she’d gotten from the cafeteria counter, what that tasted like was another mystery. Kalani frowned lightly down at her meal. It was some sort of meat stew, but she didn’t recognize the ragged blue chunks of meat, or the thick, almost syrupy purplish broth, or whatever it was in there with the broth. It had an almost overpoweringly sweet aroma, and the steam that rose up to hit Kalani’s face made her push back the dark blue scarf she had been wearing loosely draped over her head. Her stomach grumbled in hunger, the sharpest hunger she’d felt in years, but at the same time, it churned so much she felt sick.
“What do you suppose this is?” she wondered aloud, swirling her spoon through the thick broth.
Atton stared at her, his face a study in incredulity. Unlike her, he’d apparently known exactly what he’d ordered, and had had no trouble working up the appetite required to eat it. “You’re kidding, right? You just grabbed something off the counter without even figuring out what it was?”
Kalani stiffened. “The server said everything was safe for human consumption.”
“Yeah, but you could still wind up hating it, and I don’t think those guys do refunds.”
Suddenly, Kalani found herself very much wanting to talk about something else. Instead of addressing that last point, she let her spoon rest against the side of the bowl and fixed Atton in the most focused stare she could manage currently. “Atton? Can I ask you something?”
The ‘focused stare’ was still able to do its job, even if not as well as it might have done in the past. Atton leaned back a bit in his chair, avoiding her gaze. “Well,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and smiling perhaps a little apprehensively, “you can ask.”
Good enough. “When we were on Peragus, you said something to me. Something about how being a Jedi meant I couldn’t have been married. What did you mean by that?”
Atton’s eyebrows shot up, but at the same time, some strange tension bled out of his shoulders. “I’ve always heard Jedi can’t get married. It’s against your code, or something.”
“That’s not… Who did you hear that from?”
“Nobody in particular. It’s just what everybody says.” His brow furrowed as he drank in the confused look on her face. “But that’s not true for you, is it?”
Kalani shook her head violently, her heart beating erratically against her ribcage. “Before I joined the war, for a Jedi to marry was not as widely-accepted as it was when I was a child, but neither was it forbidden. One of my teachers was the child of two Jedi, and she wasn’t much older than I. I had little contact with the Order once I left to fight in the Mandalorian wars, and none once I was exiled. I…” She stared down at her hands, lying on her lap as they were. They weren’t shaking. That surprised her. “…I suppose a lot can change in twenty years,” Kalani said lamely.
The only real news she had had of the Order during the war came from the new recruits, those who were sent to fight under her command. Of all the things she had ever asked them about, the Order’s evolving stance on marriage wasn’t one of them. But twenty years was a long time. Long enough for the Council to forbid it, long enough for a whole generation to be raised regarding marriage as something forbidden for a Jedi. Long enough for that generation, and their elders, to be slaughtered by the Sith.
It shouldn’t have mattered. She was no Jedi, and hadn’t been for a long time. She had looked at the Council at the end of the war, adversaries and old friends alike, and seen people who had been content to do nothing as the Outer Rim burned. Ten years might have dulled the sharpness, but for a moment, oh, how she had hated them. They would not even cast her out over Malachor V; that, she would have understood. Instead, they cast her out for daring to follow Revan in the first place. They cast her out because they could not reach Revan herself.
If the Order had changed, it shouldn’t have mattered.
(Even then, that moment of hatred had been but fleeting. Hate required more energy than Kalani Nuna was able to expend. What she felt, mostly, was pain. Pain was her closest companion from Malachor V on, pain and that yawning emptiness where the Force should have been.)
It mattered.
“So…” Atton was looking at her almost furtively. “You’re telling me that when you were a Jedi, Jedi could still get married.”
Kalani nodded.
“So were you? Married, I mean?”
What was in his voice went beyond simple curiosity, and it made Kalani feel as though her spine would snap, she sat up so rigidly. “No,” she said shortly. With an edge as keen as mullinine in her voice, she asked, “Were you ever married?”
In that moment, Atton was as accurate a mirror for herself as Kalani had ever needed. He stiffened, his face growing mask-like in how still it was, his eyes gone hard as durasteel. “Can’t say I was,” and his voice was as flat as the table between them.
No, never married. She and Atris, once… But they had both been very young, and Kalani didn’t think Atris’s feelings for her had ever run deep enough for marriage to be a real possibility. Even if they had been, the Masters had been starting to look upon marriage with some disapproval when she and Atris were growing up. Atris would not have gone against the opinions of the Masters. Neither would have Kalani, back when she really thought that excellent performance and close adherence to the Code for long enough might be enough to make them overlook…
There had been love between them, once. But love had died, and Kalani found it difficult to remember now, what it had been like. What it had felt like when they had been in each other’s arms, what the calluses on Atris’s hands had felt like, what she had felt when Atris had smiled at her. Those memories were grown gray and dim, rotting like a corpse. The Atris branded more clearly in Kalani’s memory was the Atris who had sat in judgment of her after the close of the war. That Atris had been as remote as the edge of the galaxy, had spoken to—at her with the chilly voice of a stranger, her heart closed and her back turned.
What would Atris think, if she could see Kalani now? She was not as Atris would have remembered. She was a pale, scrawny thing who could barely eat without growing nauseated, her muscles atrophied, her hands more accustomed to a vibroblade and a Republic Army-issue blaster than a lightsaber. Her eyes were permanently circled by shadows, her long black hair cut just above her shoulders, matted and tangled because she hadn’t brushed it out properly in she couldn’t even remember how long. Her clothes were careworn, would perhaps qualify as rags after another couple of years. Her long shirt, loose over her arms and torso, once pale blue, now closer to gray; her trousers worn thin around the knees; her boots, scuffed, and her scarf beginning to fray around the edges; her old, worn army jacket, tucked away in a bag back in the apartment where no one could see it. And oh, fumbling with the Force like an infant still learning how to crawl. Would Atris pity her? Or would she feel only scorn?
And there was the other. It had not been love that passed between her and him, though they might have been friends; the relationship had been more stress-relief than anything else. They had been fighting on Dxun, and had needed all the distractions from what was happening there that they could get. And yet, Kalani found herself wondering sometimes, the thoughts gnawing on her waking mind, why it was so much easier to remember him dying, dead, than alive. Why she couldn’t remember his laugh, but could the labored gurgles that had been his last breaths. Why she could still smell the reek of his life’s blood mingling with the mud, why she could still feel the rain pounding on her back as she knelt over him, but couldn’t remember what he had looked like when he was happy and whole, couldn’t remember his touch on her skin, couldn’t even remember his name.
She tried not to remember him at all, most days. But something, Atton’s questions, sitting over a dead world whose screams reverberated in her mind, being back in Republic space at all, was bringing him back to her, and all of Dxun, too.
At last, Kalani took an exploratory sip of her soup broth; it wasn’t going to eat itself, and she needed the nourishment, even if she lacked the enthusiasm. She didn’t expect it to have any real, strong taste. Food rarely did, these days; most days, food didn’t taste like anything at all. That, at least, made it easier to force it down.
But instead, Kalani found her mouth filled with the flavor of the broth, clearer than anything she had eaten in years. It was almost overpowering, making her head swim, but wouldn’t anything, after all this time?
All at once, it was like something inside her had broken in two, again.
“Hey…” Atton’s hand hovered around her shoulder, never quite closing the gap. “…Is the soup that bad?”
His face looked warped, barely humanoid, through the tears that swam in her eyes, dribbled slowly down her cheeks. Kalani tried another smile, but all she really managed was to bare her teeth. “No,” she croaked. “It’s good.” The words felt like chewing broken glass, and she clapped her hands over her mouth, her whole body shaking with the howling that had dogged her steps for over ten years.
The anxiety coursing through the veins of the station dwellers. The dead world miles beneath her feet. The decimated Jedi Order. The incredible mess that Revan had left others to clean up when she had left Republic space. Before was almost impossible to envisage, but the now was viciously clear.
Oh, Kalani wasn’t even sure what she could do, but she had been away for far too long.