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The midnight hour brought a certain silence that Osha could never escape. Here in the darkness, all her fears and betrayals came alive, each a ghost knowing just how to wound her, how to press down on a bruise that already ached. But this was a pain she chose with eyes wide open, because as soon as she slipped into sleep, her nightmares wouldn't just leave her bruised, but bleeding freely onto the floor.
Dim traces of moonlight reflected off the central pool of the cave, casting languid shadows onto the rock walls. Osha concentrated on the reflections as they ebbed and flowed, one line twisting into two before vanishing. This was a game she had started playing on nights like these. How many minutes could she last before every awful memory became a deafening scream in the silence?
Shadows moved like slow snakes across the ceiling, slinking into pockets of rock and–Mae’s wide brown eyes as every memory of Osha slipped from her mind. Osha gripped the blanket tighter, eyes straining to find how far the water reflections reached into the cave, shifting and fading until–Sol’s face tightened with pain as Osha ripped the air from his lungs. Sol, and every lie he told that would sleep in her bones and slowly poison her blood until his betrayal threatened to destroy every cell in her body. Mae, her sister left with empty hands, a broken mind, a fractured heart. Mae, who had always lived as part of a half, but now existed as one alone in the galaxy, unknowing that her soul was tethered to another. Did the body still remember what it was like to be loved even if the mind could not? Did Mae’s arms still long to reach for a phantom?
Osha turned over in her pallet of blankets, resenting the idea of Mae being alone far off on some planet hidden among the stars with nothing and no one. Did she lie awake as she did? Did she sift through what remained of her memories, trying hopelessly to fill gaps and form a narrative that made sense?
A rustle of blankets from across the cave snagged Osha’s attention. Qimir turned in his small bed, brows drawn as if he were in pain. Sleep had not come easily to either of them in the few nights since they returned from Brendok, and their nightmares, it seemed, were things with teeth.
Osha watched Qimir’s form for a moment, silently begging the nightmare to let go of him.
“No,” he said in a broken whisper, eyes still shut, trapping him in whatever memory that haunted him tonight.
Osha lept from her makeshift bed, the cool air of the cave drifting across her skin. She barely felt a thing. Nothing mattered then except making sure he was okay. Stars could fall into the sea and obliterate this island and she wouldn’t care so long as she reached him, so long as she could drag him out of this hell that tormented his sleep.
His skin was warm and damp with sweat as she reached for his forearm. The briefest touch, and she was plunged into a sea of fear and anger. The flash of a purple lightsaber pierced the periphery of her vision before disappearing beneath waves of grief and agony.
“Qimir,” she said, his name falling like a plea from her lips. “Wake up, Qimir. Please.”
She could feel the tremble in his body as she took both his shoulders in her hands. Another wave of agony washed over her body, leaving her cold and shivering.
“Wake up.” Her eyes stung with tears as all of his pain twisted with all of her panic. She couldn’t lose him to this. She had lost her mothers, lost the semblance of a family she had in the Jedi, lost Mae. She couldn’t lose him too.
“Qimir,” she begged, tears dripping onto the collar of his shirt.
Her voice reached him, a delicate string pulling him from the depths of his nightmare. Brown eyes flashed open, wide with panic. Then that string snapped.
His hands gripped her wrists like ever tightening shackles as Qimir pinned her to the bed beneath him, and it hurt, but not nearly as much as the fear and panic in his eyes. That pain was something else. Hot stones in her stomach, glass shards in her veins, barbed wire around her heart. For a moment, all of his pain was hers and she couldn’t breathe. Lungs of sea water and blood of fire and she couldn’t breathe.
“It’s me,” she gasped. “It’s okay, Qimir. You’re here with me.”
“Osha.” Her name left his lips as if she were something he held dear, something he sought to protect even as he lay wounded.
Qimir released her, nearly stumbling back in an attempt to distance himself as if the contact of their skin had burned him.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I never should have–I’m sorry.”
But he was somewhere else, eyes darting around the cave, looking anywhere but at her as he dragged a shaking hand through his hair. Though his nightmare had removed its claws from his mind, it still left scars freshly ripped open and bleeding.
Osha longed to reach out to him, to say the perfect words that would make all this hurt go away. But she knew better than most that no such words existed. There were no easy phrases that would stitch up whatever old wound that had just been torn wide open, no whispered words that would act as medicine in his veins and eradicate all this grief and anger.
But he wasn’t alone. This, at least, Osha could give him. Just the night before, Osha had woken in terror, screaming Mae’s name. She had dreamt of the Jedi murdering Mae, mistaking her sister for herself, and for a brief moment, Osha was drowning alone in false guilt. Then warm arms wrapped around her, pulling her back from the depths of her panic. She found it was easier to breathe as Qimir held her, easier knowing he saw her pain and accepted it as a piece of who she was.
This was fate tied around their wrists, every betrayal wrapped around their throats. Distantly, Osha thought that if she died choking on each lie she was ever told, at least she wouldn’t be alone when the darkness finally swallowed her.
Osha crawled to the edge of the bed and grasped his hand with both of hers before he could pace further away from her.
“I forgive you,” she said.
Qimir paused, his eyes meeting hers for the first time.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered but I couldn’t just leave you like that,” she said. Still, his hand shook even as she held it within her own. What had happened to him that left him broken this way? Who had scarred his body and betrayed his trust? Beneath her concern for Qimir were tendrils of anger at the Jedi who did this to him.
Slowly, Osha pulled him towards her onto the bed until she could wrap her arms around him and Qimir just sank into her touch like honey into hot tea. The tension seemed to leave his body in the seconds between one breath and the next as Osha pulled him closer. She pressed her lips to the warm muscled skin between his neck and shoulder, hoping her touch would linger as a reminder that his nightmares were not his burden alone, just as her nightmares were not only hers to suffer.
Minutes drifted by as he clung to her, the silence broken only by their breathing. Osha ran her hand up and down his spine, threaded her fingers through his silken black hair, pressed her cheek to his neck until she could feel his pulse, proof that he was still with her. Each touch was another attempt to ease a fragment of his pain, to distract his mind from the dark place he had been.
It felt as if wooden splinters were burrowing into her heart at the sight of Qimir coming undone this way. He was no more than a child betrayed by the Jedi, just as she was, and it hurt to know that he had aching wounds just like she did. How could the Jedi have failed both of them so catastrophically?
“It was Vernestra, wasn’t it?” Osha pulled back just enough to search Qimir’s eyes. “She was your master. She did this to you.” Osha couldn’t stop the anger and resentment from spilling into her voice, but Qimir only nodded, a distant look in his gaze as if just hearing the Jedi’s name pulled him back into the past.
“You don’t have to explain your history or what happened between the two of you. But you can. If you want to, I will be here. You’re not alone.”
Qimir pressed his thumb to her cheek, wiping away the salt traces of her dried tears.
“Neither are you,” he said and the words embedded themselves beneath her skin like medicine. Even when she inevitably drifted back to that dark place, she would have him, these words, this touch like a promise.
Osha imagined staying like this forever, suspended in a moment in time where she felt safe in the warmth of Qimir’s arms. But they had never been more than each other’s life rafts, something to cling to in the darkness of night when their ghosts were something more corporeal, more audacious and vile. She didn’t know what it would mean if she stayed beyond the threat of those ghosts. So, Osha stood, intending to return to her pallet in the corner.
“Stay,” he whispered, half pleading as his fingers twisted around hers. “I want you to stay. Please.”
“Okay,” she said, because she didn’t entirely trust herself to say anything more.
Qimir pulled the blanket over them as she rested her cheek on his chest, his arms circling around her as if he might shield her from any attack, protect her from any threat. Absent-mindedly, Osha’s fingers slipped beneath the loose fabric of his shirt to trace the line of his collar bone. She memorized the sound of his heart beating, strong and steady and in time with her own. Despite every lie and betrayal that had left scars upon their souls, they had survived to find each other, and that was enough.
Gently, Qimir took her hand and pressed a soft kiss to her palm.
Maybe there was enough between their two hollowed out hearts to make something a little less broken.