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Osha can hear the voices echoing along the stone as she makes her way through the tunnel towards the courtyard. She can’t make out what they are saying, only that they are all there, and if they’re talking, there’s still time.
Time for what? She isn’t sure. She doesn’t even know what to hope for now. The fight with Mae has left her both drained and full of anxious energy - a bad combination, she knows. Osha trails her fingers along the stone, willing herself to calm. It doesn’t work, and she drops her hand with a sigh. Here, in this place with memories embedded into the very mortar that holds it together, she doesn’t know why she thought it would.
She turns the corner to the exit, pressing her back up against the wall to stay hidden until she can take the measure of the situation. Sol has his back to her and is arguing with Mae. Osha spots his lightsaber on the ground. So he was disarmed, but is clearly not in immediate danger. Her heart stops for half a second. Does that mean -
No, she sees Qimir standing off to the side as she carefully picks Sol’s lightsaber off the ground. Helmet off, lightsaber sparking in his hand. So disarmed, then, as well. What has happened here?
Mae’s eyes flick over to the shadows. Osha stills, but it’s too late: she makes eye contact. Mae’s cheek dimples as she bites the inside of it, and then her face hardens with some kind of resolve. Osha fingers the switch on the lightsaber, half-readying herself for a fight.
But Mae looks back at Sol. “And you killed her,” Mae says, a little louder - for Osha’s own benefit, she knows. “You killed our mother.”
Osha wants to race across the space between them and finish their fight. There are no spaceships passing by to distract them, no masters to stop them. She watched Mae light that fire and try to kill her. A darkness like that, to try and kill half your soul - what is the rest of the Coven, after that? What is Mother Aniseya?
But something stops her. Osha will never know what. Maybe it’s because Sol had promised her the truth, and she still wants to know what it is. Maybe it’s a lifetime of being unable to trust anyone, after Mae’s betrayal. Maybe she is just tired, and confused, and can’t move quickly enough. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Osha watches Sol grapple with the words as his hands clench and relax and clench again on empty air. Her heart is in her throat.
Sol’s whole body slumps. As if she’s at the bottom of a well, she hears him.
Yes. I did.
Osha takes one step into the courtyard. “Is that true?” Her voice cracks.
Sol whirls around. She doesn’t really even hear what he says. She doesn’t need to.
She had been a child, once: scared and sad and desperate for something beyond the path the Coven had placed her on. After the fire, after all the death, he had comforted her, trained her, shown her the ways of the Jedi. And Osha had looked at him like the sun itself shone from his eyes, thought he was the strongest and bravest and wisest of the Jedi. And she had watched. She paid rapt attention to everything about him: the steel of his spine and the gentle way he spoke and all the lessons he tried to teach her. She had loved him.
So she doesn’t need to hear what he says. She can tell the truth of it, there in the set of his shoulders and the lines on his face and the tilt of his head.
Her heart shatters in her chest and she shoves the pain of it away, buries it deep in her chest, a lifetime’s worth of lessons - Sol’s lessons - on emotional control that have been trained into her acting on cue. For once, it works: the immediate pain is gone. But burying the pain only leaves behind a bright, sparking clarity, the way that fire burns off impurities in metal.
Sol’s hands are upturned, pleading with her. Pleading, but not apologizing. Making excuses. She watches it all through her new cold clarity, and wonders how she ever missed it. “I kept it from you so that you could have the life you’d dreamed of.” His voice is shaking with emotion. “I did it because I lo -”
Osha doesn’t even realize what she’s doing until Sol starts to choke. Almost distantly, she wonders at herself. When did her connection to the force return, she thinks, and how did she know this was something she could do with it? But in the end, it’s instinct. She wants him to stop talking. She does not want him to finish that sentence. And if he will not stop on his own, then she will make him.
But she should stop, shouldn’t she? She should let go of the grip she has on his throat.
But that’s the thing. She has never been able to let go .
Never able to let go of the image of Mother Aniseya on the ground, eyes glassy and chest still. Never able to let go of the fear of fire that followed her after Mae burnt her life to the ground, and never able to move past the hatred. Never able to close the ragged, gaping wound in her soul that loss left behind.
Let the Force stitch it closed, Sol had said, meditate, find your peace, let go of what has happened. Remember that you are wanted here, and cared for.
But never you are loved.
No one has told her that since -
She tightens her grip. She cannot bear to hear him finish that sentence. Can’t even stand the thought of it. Because he had never said it when she was his padawan. He had offered her a new family, but it was only a lie. There was no one to hold her when she woke up from a nightmare, no one to kiss her bruises better, no one to scratch her back until she fell asleep. The Jedi were no kind of family she recognized. In the end, she was too sick with pain and grief and rage and her desperate, aching desire to be loved. She was too much for the Jedi. Too much for Sol.
To know that he loved her and he had never told her - that he had given her platitudes, counseled her to let go and move forward , left her to struggle alone with her failure, her weakness, denied her the only thing she had ever truly wanted from him -
It goes beyond hypocrisy. Beyond lies.
It is betrayal.
All the stitches she had worked so hard to sew tear open, and sixteen years worth of pain and loneliness and hatred spill out. She crooks her fingers and Sol lets out a raspy breath, falling to his knees.
“Stop. Talking.” She can feel his windpipe in her empty hand. It feels like power. It feels like justice.
Sol gives a guttural cough. She just watches, observing, the same way she used to as a child. His face begins to grow pale, the veins bulging in his forehead as he gasps for air. His breath rattles in his chest. “Osha,” Sol whispers. Her name from his mouth burns her ears. “It’s... okay,” he manages to rasp out. He nods at her ever so slightly and mouths the words again.
Rage courses through her, a white-hot forest fire. How dare he act as though it is Osha who needs forgiveness? Sol should be begging Osha to forgive him. This is his fault. He is the one who caused all this - he is the one who killed Mother Aniseya, he is the one who let Mae fall, he is the one who lied to her every single day for a decade . He is the reason she could not let go . Mae was right: he failed her.
She should have spent those years hating him instead.
She tightens her hand into a fist.
Sol takes one last, rattling breath and collapses.
Osha falls to her knees. Her hand aches. She’s shaking, the rage flowing through her in waves. But beyond the physical reaction there is - nothing. She should be horrified, shouldn’t she? She should feel guilty, at the very least. She should feel something, anything -
The air stirs. Qimir brushes his fingertips against her shoulder, featherlight, and Osha explodes. She activates Sol’s lightsaber and strikes to kill. Because this is Qimir’s fault, too. He is the one who trained Mae. He is the one who sent her out on her mission, getting Osha framed for murder and dragging her into this whole bloody mess. It is his fault that all these emotions she has worked so hard to bury have been clawed up again to choke her. His fault, for telling her all the whispered desires of her heart: that she is wanted, that all the things about her the Jedi named weakness are anything but. Stars, she wants to believe that so badly -
She bears down on the lightsaber in her hand, chest heaving. Suddenly there is a sound like metal screeching across metal; a terrible discordant clanging, a wordless shriek, all at once. It echoes in her head, her chest, her gut. It sends a shooting, twisting pain up her arm and down her spine and vibrates her teeth in her skull. Osha tastes copper and salt and the lightsaber sputters in her hand. The plasma wavers and the blade bleeds.
The crystal is the heart of the blade. She learned this at Sol’s knee, watching him deconstruct this very lightsaber so she could learn the inner workings and begin to craft her own. She watches the crimson race up the blade with a kind of sick, vicious glee. This is proof, is it not? Proof that the fury and anguish and grief she has carried for the past sixteen years mean something. That they are more than something to be disdained as weakness and hidden out of shame. They are powerful enough - she is powerful enough - to force the very essence of the crystal to change. To force it to reflect all the pain she has kept buried in her soul for so long.
When you lose everything, that’s when you’re finally free . She understands now. The grief and hatred she has carried for so long at the death of Mother Aniseya, the guilt and shame of being unable to control her emotions, the sickening rage - it’s gone. All gone. She straightens her back, letting herself feel - maybe for the first time - what it is to stand tall. The weight of her pain and suffering is gone. Now there is nothing left but her fractured, empty soul, and the lightsaber burning in her hand.