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“General?” Bao-Dur tilted his head towards the figure laying under the open engine panel of a Swoop bike with a smile as wry as his tone. “I see you’ve become an expert on engine maintenance in your boundless free time.”
“Expert-ish.” Her voice was muffled from being partially underneath the bike, the metallic squeak of a bolt followed a moment later. “You seemed busy, and it was only a loose bolt.”
She slid out from under the bike, a slight smudge of engine oil on her face, and smiled up at him with tired eyes. The exhaustion that imbued her whole presence faded slightly as Bao-Dur knelt next to her, wiping the smudge from her cheek with a tenderness that never failed to surprise her.
She was used to the aura of grief that radiated off him through the Force, but having it amplified by his gentle touch, the enormousness of the feeling called out to her again. She’d felt it on Telos, and if she were honest with herself, had probably known from the moment they’d first met that he’d had a connection to the Force.
Back then, back when war was all that she could think about, when she, like Revan, had honed her connection to the Force into a weapon of war…
She’d justified her silence with the thought that there was nobody who could have trained him, only the stagnant Jedi Order on one side and Sith on the other. Ignorance was a protection for him against corruption on both sides.
It hit her now, how cruel that had been.
All these years he’d had to carry a burden she’d cut herself off from in an act of desperation; a burden that would have been all the worse for not understanding why everything in the galaxy had an unexplained intensity of emotion.
She took his hand in her own, twining her fingers through his, sitting up as she did so. “I have something to tell you.”
Bao-Dur said nothing, although she could feel that his pulse had started to quicken.
There weren’t words for what she wanted to convey; she squeezed his hand firmly, taking a deep meditative breath.
Even since there had been a Jedi Order scholars had tried to narrate the feeling of first experiencing a connection to the Force.Tucked away in far corners of the Academy there were physical books on the subject, kept more as artifacts than anything else – their pages hand-illuminated with depictions of Jedi from a thousand worlds all in meditation, each glowing with an inner-light in a seemingly universal understanding that the Force was a sort of inner brightness.
That was what she focused on, her own tenuous connection to the Force, the faintest of embers left from what had once been an inferno of power. A flicker, barely a spark, passed between them, Bao-Dur’s eyes widening in surprise.
Flashes of his memories passed to her, the strongest of them a yearning to commit himself to repairing the damage done by the war. She felt, as he had at the time, the web of life in the cool wet soil of Telos; roots of trees extending downwards bringing with them a supporting network of fungi, insects, mosses – a galaxy of life under his hands.
She’d never understood the Force that way before, and yet–
That was how he had felt the Force all his life, the connections made at the smallest levels.
It seemed self-evident now that he’d built his floating probe droid as a way to cope. Now that she understood, it blazed a blinding white in the Force, not alive, but a container for everything he’d felt but had no words for. Another memory: he’d built the droid right after Malachor, within days of their pyrrhic victory; he too had tried to cut himself off from the raw, pulsating pain that mass death had caused.
“I didn’t know,” he said, his words hesitant, “just how much you carried back then.”
The sadness returned to her eyes, but his grip on her hand tightened into a protective squeeze.
“Lucky for you, you’ve got a washed up mechanic here to help you carry the weight of the galaxy.” His assurance, as soft and tender as his touch, held the conviction of absolute truth.