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Zoey always finds herself comfortable on Mira’s lap. She plays with twi’lek’s lekku, caressing slowly with her thumb, looking at how Mira’s pink skin shivers from the touch – yet she never asks to stop.
Rumi placed herself next to them, her own hair long ago made into a myriad of little braids, tied with no deep thoughts to it, just by the fact that the other girls had nothing to do with their empty hands. It was a simple show of affection– no, not affection. Rumi hissed and pinched herself. They can’t afford affection. Not when their relationship is already heretical. Every little shift would make an awful cross out of the line for bad.
“Your brainthingies is so long.” Zoey stated it once again; she does every time when her hands are on lekku.
“You clearly was raised on some shitplanet in the middle of a nowhere galaxy, Zo,” Mira swiveled her leg and spread it wide, making Zoey fall uncomfortably in the sudden gap between her legs “Don’t call my lekku like that, you ignorant… Ignorant… dum-dum.”
“Dum-dum, really?” Rumi raised her brow.
“Oh, I’m so sorry for being such an ignorant huma-an.” Zoey laughs and raises her head, her gaze full of too familiar spite that makes Rumi horrified.
“Yeah, we should totally make you unlearn some things.”
“No-o,” Zoey placed her hand on her own chest, in a spot where her heart was beating fast enough for Rumi’s senses to catch how it disturbed the Force in a small way; like a ripple with no trace to leave in a grand scheme of things. It doesn’t matter. Never had. They can allow it. “Can’t go against my own blood!”
“Oh, maybe you're right. The worst of your kin will never go clean on you! Bear the sins of your predecessors…” Mira laughed; not a wrinkle on her face.
Rumi probably was the opposite. Her father’s genes put a wicked joke on her, made her way older than she was ever supposed to be. She never got to be a child in the first place – weapons were made into being and to lay in hand perfectly, not to slowly grow into usage.
“…I’m a human too.” Rumi made herself say this just to stop their bickering. And to shut the dreadful voices in her head up from spinning around.
Both padawans looked at her amused. Zoey raised herself by the arms, still tangled in Mira’s limbs, her mouth a little bit open – in a pity.
“Well…” Mira frowned.
“Rumi, you know…” Zoey bit her lip and shifted her gaze to wonder somewhere in the room, brows nervously pressed low. “Let’s be honest, your Jedi training made you less of a human and more of a…”
“Very well attuned droid.” Mira ended.
Rumi cringes away from both of them, jumping up from the couch. “Me?! We’re all training together!”
“But you were like… brought to all this stuff as an infant. Childest child! A baby!”
“And I was just bought into it as an already established teenager.” Mira smirks. When both girls look at her – she shrugs and huffs without hesitation. “What? That’s exactly what happened.”
“So we’re finally addressing the bantha in the room?”
Before Rumi could even say or do anything, the ship creaked and shaken. The ground underneath Rumi’s legs went away and she fell right in front of the girls just on her face.
“Sorry!” screamed Bobby from behind the pilot's cabin.
And Rumi doesn’t dare to say anything on how Zoey’s blush is deep blue, not red. Not the time for it, yet.
She was standing there, her leg pushing on the chestplate of an old trooper. Fast and hard breathing, she felt how her own blood was pouring from her forehead onto chin. The stink of her own sweat, unbearable heat of the suns and a taste of blood got Rumi choking.
A yellow, feverishly bright horizon with no trace of a human life. This planet with a bunch of suns in its orbit just wasn’t cut out for living, ground dry and fruitless, air thick enough to make a human feel dizzy after a few hours of breathing it. Great place to dwell on your sins for the rest of your life.
That’s where Rumi found him. Deserter of the Empire, old enough to remember the temple’s fall. Clones like this were the first priority for Celine for the information they could provide.
“Where are the other clones?”
“I live here all alone.” he laughed through pain.
“Bullshit.”
Clone looked up at her with a pathetic defeat in his eyes, resembling more of an animal that begged to put it down out of misery – than a fighter who destroyed countless lives in his time. Rumi felt like someone just spat on her face.
It just wasn’t fair. He barely put up a fight, and his old age made him way weaker. What honest would that do for a Jedi – to kill her enemy, wickedly and cruel, like clone troopers did with her Order? What would that make of Rumi? The same villain as her dad, she thought, and her frown grew darker.
“Rums, you’ve run like crazy.” Mira caught up to her finally, her wild cough and hardened breathing from the long run filled the silence between the two.
“Yeah, that was, like, really strange.” Zoey added almost in a whisper, her words coming in between a hysterical laughter that was on the verge of a stroke.
Rumi stayed silent. Her gaze set upon the older man, the prey in her arms – she forces herself to keep her saber still, just a few inches from the enemy’s throat. His beard lit up and a small amount of hair burned down.
“Go on, kid. Finish this.” clone said through his whine.
“You’re not in a position to command,” she huffed. “Not anymore.”
“Never was to begin with,” he laughed and opened his eyes – the same brown eyes that Rumi eases to see when she looks in the mirror. “You, Jedi, placed everything in your hands, huh.”
“Everything,” Rumi pressed her lightsaber just a bit closer to his throat. “But the damned blasters.”
“Yeah,” he coughed. “Yeah.”
Rumi felt a disturbance. A call passed through Force, one that Zoey and Mira subconsciously crafted just to stop her.
Their connection to Force was strong, but not keen enough to feel such little pressure in it or to directly engage in making any. They don't even know what they were doing to her! And Rumi never had a chance to reject something this tender and eager, left to give up quickly.
Zoey rushed into their clash to stop it, her eyes were filled with an undeserved love and affection for a man whose existence was a joke. She put her hand on Rumi’s lightsaber’s hilt, gently pulling it a little on the side, away from the man’s throat – and Rumi turned it off.
She wouldn’t dare to kill unarmed men anyway. Even if he was her greatest enemy.
“You look familiar, kid,” clone squinted at her. “Reminds me of a certain brother. You’re one of my nephews, huh? Thought he was lying when he said that a Jedi is a–“
Rumi turned on her lightsaber before he could end the sentence. The buzzing stab through his throat was sudden and quick, almost too merciful for a haughty bastard. Quickly his smug changed into a gruesome grimace of shock and disbelief in his last living moments, now forever graven on his face, with mouth open for the unreleased cough.
“Rumi, what the fuck?!” Mira and Zoey screamed in unison.
“We needed him alive!” Celine yelled at her. Her face was red – it was the first time when Rumi saw her in such a terrible state. But in anger and fury always was hidden a power, Rumi knew it too well, and her own body shrunk and trembled more and more with every passing minute.
Right now she was no better than a child, with a humorous feeling of betrayal by the mere fact that its mother was in power not only to praise and to protect – but to scold too.
And Rumi wasn’t a child. And Celine was her master, so it was only fair for her to teach and to punish her unworthy padawan. It was a great part of the process of learning to be a real Jedi knight, Rumi always insisted on that part; but she was the one to comfort the scolded, not to be one.
It just was too painful to end up on a guilty side, enough to make her all teared up and sobbing.
(She was supposed to learn how to avoid it so many years ago, when Mira and Zoey weren't even around. She was supposed to be better. To do better. To inspire them).
“He knew too much. He…” Rumi gulped. “He knew my… My circumstances. Of my birth.”
“That is why we need him! He might've known where your father is, he might…” she stops for a second, nervously combing her greyed hair with hand. “…why can’t you just be like your mother?” it came out desperate, almost on the verge of collapse.
Rumi shakes.
“But I am! I am!” finally tears are breaking free, and she screams at the top of her lungs. Her hands are shaking and she points at her chest, somewhere – where all of her filthy feelings and thoughts come from. “All that’s inside of me, it's all hers!”
She felt how her skin was tingling, static raised her body hair and sent shivers down her spine. She heard cracking near her body, all over her, and a sudden move – a lightning came out. Thunderous waves and burns were coming out of her.
A sudden electric cut struck Celine when she tried to embrace Rumi, and she jumped back in disbelief. Air buzzed with the electric shock that filled the room, Rumi’s fingertips stinging from the heat as the lightning surrounded her.
“What are you doing?!”
“I don’t know, I don’t…” Rumi choked. The lightning struck her, too, pain making her so weak that she couldn’t bring herself together to stop.
It wasn’t right.
“Rumi, stop this.” Celine was afraid.
It was the dark side. No power like that would come from righteousness. And Rumi now was soaked in it, bringing pain to Celine, and to herself, and now the girls in the next room would feel the dark, rotten sensation in the Force and they’ll definitely find out who Rumi really was and would leave her, and she’ll never restore the Order that her father and his brothers destroyed, and there would be no redemption for Rumi, and she’ll end up all alone, a traitor like her dad, and her mom, and there would be no harmony in the Force, and she’ll never see her girls again, they would think of her as a disgusting betrayer and a killer, a slayer of her own family, because that clone was her uncle no matter what, and her girls, her girls would hate her so much, and
And
Andand and and
And
An d and
Andandandandabdandandandandandabdandandandandandabdandandandandandabdandandandandandabdandandddddd ddd ddd dd dddddddd dddddd dddddddddddddd ddddd dd d dddddd
dd
d d ddd d
She woke up in the full darkness, the porthole of her cabin sealed so tight that even the starlight cannot escape through the louver grating. Rumi felt uneasy heat burning her skin, all of her body covered in sweat and a drool coming from her mouth. She moved under a bunch of blankets that almost chained her to the bed with its weight, and sat up on the edge of her bed.
Burning feet touched the metallic floor of the ship, and she felt a little bit easier. It was cold and nice. But as her blurred vision was gone, she looked down and saw strange and unexpected stripes on her skin – she touched it and hissed.
Rumi immediately regretted her escape from the bed, every move was painful and made her curse, but she kept on going, reaching with her trembling hands to the light switch.
In the mirror there was a stranger. One with lightning marks all over her body.
She tucked her sleeves lower, hearing the slow steps on the roof of their spaceship. The planet they stopped at seemed to be still in its winter season, but, gladly, not too cold as it might’ve been. Rumi was glad – the weather served her well as to cover up her burns from the lightning with a bunch of clothes. She wouldn’t complain.
“Rums?” raspy voice of Mira, slow sigh from Zoey.
She suddenly felt a blanket, gently (undeserved) covering her shoulders. Girls sat down next to her, each on one of her sides.
They were silent. Starry sky above them flickered with a million lights – each of these lights was a dying star somewhere long ago; already long gone and never to return. And still, their lights were underlining Rumi’s scarred skin right now.
As if never dead. As if there is no escape from their shine.
(was her parents – stars? she always thought of the vast and cold space more as a home than a little lovely planet her family tried to raise her in. It was the years before the Fall. Years before Rumi had to learn what death was).
“You always do that.” Mira said in a whisper.
“What?”
“You sit alone. For, like, a few hours.”
Rumi hums. She does that, and never saw such things as wrong or bad. It was a way to mediate, and Jedi were obliged to do so.
“I need time to think, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” Zoey pulled to her side, making Rumi hiss from the pain in her burned skin. “But that’s not good for you to rot in all that brooding.”
“I’m not… Hey!” Rumi shook her head, eyes darting from one girl to another in a search of disapproval.
“Yes, yes you are!” Zoey pouted. “And that only makes you worse.”
“You, like, totally gloomy and stiff for a week,” Mira added. “If we’re not here to talk it out.”
“There is nothing to talk about.” she tucked the blanket closer, at the last and pathetic might trying to hide herself from the girls with such a thin line of textile.
A low growl of the motor stopped, and only then Rumi felt how the mechanical presence of it was engraved in her mind. It was always like that – little things to remind her, how the spaceship had become her real and only home.
She looked up at the sky. Rumi knew that somewhere here, among those stars, was a small planet with nothing to particularly stick out from the thousands of other small planets like this. Climate was not too radical, water level just enough to live and fish, earth food enough to feed the population. Somewhere in here was a house of hers. One where she lived for the first few years of her life – and one when her mother died by the hand of her father.
Shoot her in the head.
He shot her in the head.
Rumi scratched her head.
“So, you’re gonna say something about that?” Mira asked.
“Ugh…” groaned Rumi.
“Rums, I know that we’re not particularly… talking about such things more often. But if we don’t acknowledge it, it doesn't mean we don’t see it. Like the fact that there is no way Zoey is a full blooded human.”
“Hey!” Zoey took a defensive stance.
“Well, we’re not talking about that…” Rumi agreed and slapped herself on the face. “But, ugh…”
“No-no-no, wait, you all knew?! Who told you that? Celine?!” wide eyes of Zoey made Rumi finally chuckle and ease for a little bit.
“Zo, your blood is blue.”
“And you’re freckles are like. Bluish grey.”
“And your eyes are kinda…”
“Okay, enough! Enough!” Zoey pulled up her hood to hide the blue blush that quickly appeared on her face. “I thought I got it…”
“And we never talked about that because we love you,” Mira sighed. She shook her hand before adding: “…and respect you.”
“Huh,” that made Zoey visibly relieved, but still just as upset. “Well. I guess we are revealing our hands here.”
Rumi hated that she had to reveal her hands more literally. Ugly scars that widely spread throughout her body drove her into madness with every passing moment, and she unconsciously pulled the sleeves to cover her hands more.
“We’re not asking you about any of your marks, it's your talk with Celine. Although we don’t appreciate such awful ways of punishment and– And if she tries to hurt you again, we’ll beat her ass, I swear– And…. She… We–… Anyway, we’re also not asking you for the reason why you killed that clone,” Mira looked at the horizon, and Rumi looked at her – stars shining on the pink skin, lekku swinging free in the back. Chest tightened in a painful knot; and Rumi really wanted to reach out and touch her… friend? Coworker? She didn’t even know why she craved the simple skin-on-skin contact, as if it would magically cure her burning body. “But we still see it.”
Zoey takes her hand in hers (like she could hear the suppressed thoughts in Rumi’s head). And it felt like a remedy from the pain, soreness eased and lifted by the single touch. It wasn’t real. It can’t be.
But Rumi leaned closer to her girls.
“My father is Pantoran,” Zoey whispered. “I was raised more like a human, anyway. Nevermind the fact that I was never accepted by any of my both kinds. Humans just… don’t give a fuck more or less. Not the kids, though.”
“Yeah, kids are assholes on every planet.” Mira laughed.
“Yes-s-s, exactly! Augh… Well, anyway. Rumi,” grasp tightened. “I know what it’s like to be a halfblood. You’re not supposed to be alone in this.”
“And who cares if your father was a clone? It’s not like you’re gonna blast us with your gun. You’re not him, you know that?” Mira took her other hand and smiled lightly.
“I… guess?” Rumi shrugged.
Zoe smiled and her body turned to excited tense in a second. Smile wide and open enough to count every single tooth in her mouth, eyes full of shine and star’s reflection. Real Zoey, not burdened by the pain that Force brought to their lives.
“Oh, it totally explains the whole thing with “all clones are enemies!”. I would be nuts if my dad destroyed the cult that I’m into now!”
“It’s not a cult!”
“Sorry, sorry, old habit!”
Rumi tried to make sense of the situation. Girls definitely knew now that she is of clone nature, but her mother was, it seemed, still unguessed. Good.
Something in her stomach swirled.
“But… thank you,” Rumi roughly blinked out the upcoming tears in the corner of her eyes. “For the understanding.”
“Well, we love you, Rumi,” Mira said, too quietly and uncertain, especially for herself. “Even a bit too much. You know that.”
She knew. Of course she did. That’s why her skin was burnt to the point where even the force cannot heal her wounds. And that was the reason why her mother fell in the first place, isn’t it.
Such feelings cannot be shared and cannot be shown, more so – cannot be felt. Not by the Jedi that swore to protect the realm and put harmony above all else.
“There is a reason why Force binds us to each other,” Zoey is full of strain and anxiety with her little twitches and shakes, but her voice is clear and solid as she said that. “And we cannot betray the Force like that. No matter what, we’ll go through everything together.”
“Together.” Mira repeated.
But Rumi is silent. She tightened her grip on each hand, by the pure reflex, but her mind counts every second of such affection as the real betrayal of the Force and the Order. The girls were so warm, but it burned her to ashes.
At least they had no idea who her mother was.
They fell asleep on that roof in the exact same position not too long after. Mira was humming some old song of her people, one that Rumi and Zoey already learned from the quiet and gentle nights like that.
It wasn’t right, but it was what it is.