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Korriban wasn’t a fun planet. Actually, Atton didn’t know who he thought he was kidding; none of the planets on their space-trip from hell had been fun planets. Telos was a burned-out wasteland and Dantooine was a cratered wasteland that somehow managed to feel even deader than Telos, despite not also being a scorched shell. The fact that Atton got shot on Dantooine didn’t do wonders for his opinion of the place. Nar Shaddaa was a lot less fun when you were consistently sober during your stay there, and Dxun…
Atton had never served on Dxun, in any capacity. But he had still served, and a place like Dxun was, well… Kalani and Bao-Dur had both served here. He’d watched them the whole time, and what he saw was enough to leave him relieved that Kreia’d decided that whatever obscure business she had on Dxun was concluded upon Kalani heading back from Onderon.
All in all, this had been the trip that fun forgot. Everywhere they went, there was someone shooting at them, and it was even odds whether or not Atton would wind up in a cell. He’d been talked down to by a tin can, had his brain picked by Kreia the Decrepit and been blackmailed for the results, they’d picked up an obnoxious bounty hunter on Nar Shaddaa (who did have her good qualities, if he was being fair), and a sketchy-as-hell historian on Dantooine (Who, by contrast, had no good qualities whatsoever). By the time they were heading away from Dxun, Atton would have traded his pazaak deck and every last credit he’d ever won with it for somewhere they could go that wasn’t going to give him a headache or a badly-choked down panic attack.
Then, face stretched and eyes darting back and forth, back and forth, unwilling to focus on anything, let alone him, Kalani had come into the cockpit and told Atton they were heading to Korriban.
Atton had never served on Korriban, either. He’d lucked out, been too valuable as a Jedi hunter to be sent into that meat grinder of a planet. (He’d lucked out; no one he reported to had ever realized there was a reason he was such a good Jedi hunter.) He’d heard stories from the few among the rank-and-file who were stationed on Korriban who came back in one piece, and yeah, meat grinder was a good description for the place. The stories usually ended in Dark Jedi making the sand run red with blood.
And Kalani wanted to go there.
Well, want was too strong a word. Given the way her hand started to shake as she typed the coordinates into the nav computer, Atton didn’t think she especially wanted to go there at all.
(“Still got some juma juice from Nar Shaddaa, if you’re interested.”
“I don’t get drunk, remember?” she told him, almost absently. Atton could have believed it was absent, if it hadn’t been so taut.
“Fine. I’ll drink and you can watch me get drunk. Hell knows I could use a drink, if we’re seriously going there.”)
That was Kalani, though. She was, unfortunately for her, absolutely the type of person who’d throw herself on her own sword if she thought it would save the galaxy. Really reenact one of the old Alderaanian tragedies. And after everything else, going to a planet she didn’t want to must have seemed like nothing.
Atton knew from the beginning that Korriban wasn’t going to be a fun planet. He’d heard the rumors, knew there was a good chance they were going to land outside of Dreshdae and find the whole place empty. The ghostly violence of Dxun had invaded the ship and reached under his skin to scream directly into his mind. He hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep the whole time he was there, and it had almost been a relief when the Sith had attacked the Mandalorian camp, because at least then there was a concrete explanation for why the humid air smelled as if it had been raining blood instead of water, an explanation for why the mud still smelled as if it had soaked up thousands of millions of gallons of blood when the campaign had been fought more than a decade ago. Dxun did that to him. Korriban was going to be abject hell.
Korriban was a very different animal than Dxun. Atton knew that the moment they landed. Desert world versus jungle moon, battleground in the Mandalorian wars versus a planet that had gone untouched by that particular galactic conflagration. But these were cosmetic differences, and once he’d stood on the surface of the planet, every other way in which Korriban was a different kind of animal than Dxun came rushing to him.
Dxun was choked with the earth-flesh memory of the carnage that had ripped up its surface and crowded with its ghosts. If the dead were corporeal and tangible on that moon, there wouldn’t have been a square inch on its entire surface where you could set your feet. The dead were restless there. The Force screamed there, and it was hard to hear yourself think, so hard that there had been a couple of days when Atton didn’t bother—couldn’t focus enough—to sound out pazaak games in his head. He didn’t think anyone capable of noticing the difference had noticed, anyways. Maybe even Kreia hadn’t.
Korriban was dead, dead, dead. There were animals living on the surface of the planet, hellbeasts to match Korriban’s reputation, but even they seemed like the howling of the wind through the charred skeleton of a burned house. There were no people left on Korriban but the idiots in the Ebon Hawk who came here looking for a Jedi—and maybe that Jedi was here, but somehow, Atton doubted it. The Force was silent here; Atton didn’t go looking for it too often, didn’t reach out to it or ask it questions, but its silence was a physical presence as daunting as the necropolis they’d touched down in. Korriban was empty, even of its ghosts. Standing there, it was hard for Atton not to feel empty, too.
(He was working on his second glass of juma juice, and this stuff had either been watered down, or was cheap to start with, because with the potent stuff, the really potent stuff, Atton was pretty sure he’d have been out like a light by now, and with this stuff, he just felt buzzed. Or maybe he was a bit drunker than that. It was all relative, and after a certain point, it was really hard to tell.
“We ever gonna go somewhere fun?” was what Atton Rand, in his infinite drunken wisdom, blurted out, eyeing the woman who had taken the seat next to his in the cockpit only a little hazily—he was, after all, an old hand at this.
Kalani ran a hand through her silky black hair, letting it slip through her fingers to brush against her cheeks. A high-pitched shrill of a laugh jarred from her mouth. “Define ‘fun.’”
“Somewhere we don’t get shot at. Or arrested. Somewhere you don’t get kidnapped. Someplace with strong liquor and smoky pazaak dens.” Atton stared out into the swirling blue-white vortex of hyperspace, struggling to focus his eyes upon the lines. Or were they lanes? “Nice weather?”
Another laugh, less shrill and more shaky. Kalani pressed her back tight to the chair. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” A spasm of a smile twitched on her lips. “Dantooine is actually quite nice when there aren’t raiders trying to burn settlements to the ground.”
“Yeah, paranoid locals and nothing around the outpost for miles. Real nice.”
She was fidgeting with her hands. That was new; Kalani had a few tics that Atton had spotted in their time traveling together, but he’d never seen her picking at her hands like that. It looked a little like she was trying to peel away the fallow skin of her hands. Her metacarpals danced as she flexed her fingers.
Atton’s gaze strayed up to Kalani’s face, raking up her small frame, and he remembered suddenly why he avoided being around her when he was drunk. Why he avoided looking at her at all when he was drunk. Because the part of his goddamned brain that wasn’t playing his own private game of pazaak kept straying to her. To her hair. Her lips. Her skin. His brain kept asking questions. Like whether her hair was as soft as it looked. Whether her skin would flush pink, or red. What kind of little noises she’d make if—
He looked away so fast that stars burst behind his eyelids. Without another word, Atton got up and left the cockpit. He might have been drunk, but he was sober enough to know what was good for him.)
He didn’t think Kalani was feeling too empty, right now. Not like the hollowed-out gourds people had used as wind chimes in the town where he’d grown up. He’d watched her pace the floors of the Ebon Hawk like a caged lion whose cage was ever-shrinking, listen to her mutter indistinctly to herself, and he didn’t think that was how she felt at all.
This was bad. It was bad enough that, even when Kalani had asked him to follow her into that shyrack den of a cave when the current sandstorm stopped, even when it had meant dealing with Korriban’s every attempt to hollow him out, he’d been glad she asked. Atton was no expert when it came to the mysteries of the Force, but he knew it could hurt. He’d had ample experience with the ways the Force could hurt you. He looked at her eyes and the way they would glaze over and get dull, and he thought the Force might be hurting her.
He wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Atton wasn’t privy to what conversations Kalani had with Kreia—didn’t really want to listen to them—but they seemed to carry on a little longer than usual. Visas murmured to Kalani in an undertone; Bao-Dur came and sat with her when she did ship maintenance; Mira frowned at her long and hard whenever they were in the same room. Mical’s solicitousness would have been grating as hell to watch under normal circumstances, but the bright gleam of something close to fear in his eyes at least signaled to Atton that he wasn’t imagining things.
This… was not a fun planet. Atton would be glad to never come back here again.
Accordingly, shooting his way through the shyrack tomb was not fun. Shyrack weren’t exactly hard to kill; they were basically giant moths with teeth, and Atton was pretty sure he could have killed them all just by lighting a flare and picking them off when they circled round it. But by the time they were about fifty feet in, they’d been swarmed by the damn things three times and Atton had no idea what they were supposed to be doing in there. Visas didn’t ask questions, but that was just Visas. She went where Kalani directed her without a second thought.
And by the time they were about fifty feet in, Atton was catching Kalani’s elbow and righting her after she’d stumbled for what was, unfortunately, not a number as small as the third time. This was not the third time, so when their eyes met this time, he felt justified in asking her, in a low tone, “You okay?”
Her eyes barely reflected the dim light of their glowsticks. “Fine. Just a bit…” She never finished the sentence, instead heading off further into the cave.
Korriban was an empty tomb. Atton didn’t know why he was even surprised when it turned out there was a tomb in the depths of the cave.
He didn’t know why he was surprised when Kalani insisted that she had to go into the tomb by herself, why he was surprised when she told him and Visas to head back to the ship, even though she’d been the one to insist, when they first landed here, that no one could be out on the planet’s surface by themselves.
And she wasn’t listening to arguments, and the entrance to the tomb sealed itself behind her on top of that, so in the face of Kalani’s seeming confidence that she could find her own way out again, Atton had seen nothing to do but head back to the ship. At the very least, he knew she’d have been pissed if he’d let Visas go back to the ship alone, when there were still tuk’ata everywhere and those massive dragon-like beasts that appeared out of nowhere if you happened to trip on one of the many, many, many corpses strewn about the plain, half-buried in sand. Those things would give you a beating if you weren’t careful. (And maybe he just didn’t want to let Visas go off alone to get handed a bruising by tuk’ata or invisible dragons. Maybe there was room in his shriveled-up heart for concern.)
They made it back to the Ebon Hawk without incident, Visas immediately scarpering off to go meditate or whatever it was she did all the time in the starboard dormitory. The area around the gangplank was empty. The wind was picking up outside, and Atton couldn’t tell if there was anyone talking nearby. He stared into the ship, stared at the grains of sand being blown in at his feet. Took a long huff of a breath, and headed back out into the murderous wind that kept trying to blind him and choke him with sand. Because it was too easy to fall back into following orders mindlessly, and he didn’t want to go back to that place. Not ever.
Atton didn’t go so far as to head back into the cave itself. The place reeked, and as bad as it was outside, it was a hell of a lot worse inside. As far as he could tell, this was the only way in or out of the cave. Kalani would have to come out through here.
If Atton remembered correctly, the star around which dead Korriban orbited was called Horuset. Horuset was dripping garish red onto Korriban’s bronze-tinged blue sky, was painting lines of black onto brown sand and variegated stone. Atton had a good view of the descent into the valley from where he was standing, and he looked down on it, wishing inexplicably for rain. Something to wash away everything that made this place too dead for ghosts to linger.
Somewhere behind him, he knew he’d find the abandoned Sith Academy. He didn’t dare turn around, didn’t dare try to look. There was a ribbon of a road in his past that led to there, and one of the few mercies that had ever come to him was that it had frayed and snapped before he’d ever reached the finish line. He’d avoided being devoured by this place by the skin of his teeth. He’d never wanted to try his luck again. Atton barely knew what he wanted most days, but he knew he did not want to be swallowed whole by the things that lurked in the back-corners of his mind.
It was getting darker; that garish red had spilled across the sky in whole, and then started turning purple, darker and darker until the first of the stars could be made out through billowing clouds of sand. The wind was quieting some, and that might have been the only reason Atton heard light footfalls behind him before he saw a second shadow appear beside his own.
“I thought I told you to go back to the ship.”
The wind was quieter, but it was still loud enough that Atton didn’t at first understand the rawness in her voice, and he replied before he’d completely turned to face her, lopsided smirk on his face, “Yeah, but here I thought you might be missing me, so I figured I’d…”
He turned. He saw her. The smirk shriveled on his mouth, and words petered into nothing.
Kalani must have cracked a fresh glowstick while she was heading out of the cave; they didn’t last as long as she’d been in there by herself. It was a sickly yellow-green in color, and it lit up the glittering tracks on her cheeks like a track of tightly-clustered stars in empty space over their heads. He’d seen her distraught, and she wasn’t now, but her shoulders sloped with an exhaustion too heavy to allow for being distraught. Bloodshot eyes completed the portrait.
She tipped her chin up to look him in the eye, clenched her fingers around the glowstick so tight Atton half-expected the plastic casing to burst.
His mouth worked, and nothing came out. There was a part of his brain that managed to get caught on how beautiful she was, in spite of the fact that she’d clearly been crying her eyes out not an hour earlier. He wished that part of his brain would fall out and never return. What Atton eventually came up with was, “This has been the worst planet.”
She was clawing at her hand again, glowstick balanced between two fingers, a bobbing bar of sickly light in the dusk. “We should…” She faltered, paused, swallowed thickly. “We should head back. It’s worse at night.”
Atton could believe that. Dxun had been worse at night. Telos, too. He nodded choppily, unsure of how to address her appearance, or the fact that she was obviously coming apart at the seams, worse even than she had on Dxun. (That she’d maybe come apart completely inside that tomb.) He wasn’t… He wasn’t good at that. He couldn’t…
“Then let’s go back.”
He waited for her to pass him. Kalani always wanted to take point, despite the fact that she was five foot nothing and slender and most of the animals they’d come across on this wasteland probably weighed more than she did. Atton didn’t feel like arguing that point today. She was better at watching for things coming at her from the front than she was at watching her back, anyways. Someone needed to watch her back, even if doing it made it harder for that someone to catch her eye.
The glowstick slid from Kalani’s hand, falling to the ground with a sandy thump. Atton’s eyes locked on it, confused, but before he could say anything, before his brain could process what she was doing, Kalani had closed the gap between them. Stepped into him, clamped her arms tight around his back the way a vine clings to a tree.
Atton froze, his pulse picking up until his blood raced through his skin so fast he thought he might throw up. He hoped she didn’t notice. He hoped whatever impulse that suddenly saw her lightyears more tactile than she’d been for as long as he knew her would keep her from noticing. She quivered noticeably, her breath ragged. Her head was a solid weight on his chest that just sent his pulse racing faster.
He didn’t want to want what he wanted. There were times, and this was one of them, where Atton didn’t want to want anything at all, just wanted to cut out everything that made him move through the galaxy as anything but a spectator. Do the job Korriban had been trying to do on him, the job the Sith would have done if they’d ever realized what he was. Hollow himself out and leave behind a shell that was moved by nothing. Just be like a gourd with holes drilled in it, hung up to moan hollowly when the wind blew through.
He wanted to want nothing less than the feel of her uneven pulse made him feel sick. Cautiously, Atton slid an arm around her lower back. Hugs did kind of require the participation of both of the people involved, after all. The other hand went to the back of her head, but Atton flinched away a moment later and let his hand fall to her shoulder instead. Her hair was just as soft as it looked, and he hated the feeling that confirmation kindled in his gut.
They hung like that for… Atton wasn’t exactly keeping time. The sky didn’t get any darker, just stayed that deep bruise-purple, stars shining down on them uncaringly. It was Kalani who shifted, which was fitting, seeing as Atton hadn’t done much of anything to start with. “Sorry,” she muttered, not meeting his gaze, mouth creased in a hard, thin line. “We really should return to the Ebon Hawk. It’s not safe out here at night.”
“Hey.”
Atton meant to say something, if not comforting, then at least commiserating. She got like this, and… They were both veterans; he knew the score. Watching her get like this—
“It’s no picnic while the sun’s out, either.” And that glib response was what came out instead. Stupid.
He could vaguely make out Kalani shaking her head as she picked up the glowstick. The place where she had been felt cold and oddly forlorn now that her body heat, however scant, wasn’t sinking into his clothes. There was something slipping away from him, and Atton didn’t know what it was, didn’t know what to name it, but this time he wasn’t content to let it slip away from him. This time, he greeted the idea with something close to panic.
As they were making the descent into the valley, Atton, completely on impulse, slung his arm around Kalani’s shoulders.
The last time he’d tried something like that had been years ago in a bar on Nar Shaddaa. He’d been so far gone on cheap whiskey he could barely see straight, and the other person had clocked him so hard the bruise had lasted for weeks. Kalani just tensed, then let out a shuddering breath and leaned in a little, still quivering.
(The cheap or diluted—or both—juma juice was almost gone now, but there was enough for one good bout of drinking.
Atton could hear Kalani and Kreia arguing off in the port dormitory. He didn’t go to investigate. He made certain he didn’t drink where he could see her.)