.poltergeist

He doesn’t have to try, he doesn’t have to do anything at all to see her as she was then. To see the memories flicker across her face. As one of the last of his childhood left alive. As one of the last that will get to know each other through most of their lives. Miraculously still alive, and even more—in front of each other. All he knows is desperate hope in every part of life.

But, he can suppress the memories, tell all to pause in his mind so he can watch her. Notice the steadiness, the way it hits her limbs, maybe notice it before she does. The persistent trembling. Blame it on the trained eye.

“That’s all you need—to promise yourself to something.” A half-smile her way, genuine. Whatever’s enough. Enough to be spoken about. Enough to face. “No one will make you stay on Yavin, if you don’t want to. If you don’t want to stay, after this.” A beat. “I won’t make you.”

He’d tell her, she doesn’t have to say it, or anything, if she doesn’t want to. She can just stay, and he’d know what it means. Know it’s maybe not for a Rebellion by the look in her eyes, the way she holds her shoulders. The silence is easier anyway. To tell a person by the way they hold a blade, the way they hold their back, it’s deeper than any conversation. “But I might ask you to.”

And just like that, he accepts her promise to him in that not-quite way Atticus tends to work around things rather than try to bind them to a formal logic. He operates in the realm of intuition, feeling. She has always tried to build systems around him, translate his moral compass into rules she can understand, a dependency of sorts. How utterly foreign, how completely like they were.

His face does a strange thing, and she nearly cannot map it until she realizes — oh, Atticus Prior is smiling at her. Automatically, she calculates the years she has spent forgetting that smile. Like so many other tiny joys, this one slipped away from her, replaced by the curious blankness of a drug-induced amnesia.

But seeing it again, she locates that smile across time, charts its evolution and moon phases until she lands here again. Not quite a grin, never a smirk, dancing on the edge of alien but always superhuman in warmth. She remembered him in thought, in battle, in pain, but never like this.

(He wishes for the way she felt. Wishes to feel nothing at all, a numbness, fear all that can be felt on his skin, while wondering if he can feel at all. Can he feel anything but the fabric on his shoulder or the memory of his old Master’s laughter? Is there anything? Can they live there, even if not forever? The space between the unknown. He doesn’t know how he looked during the night, or even her. He was too far gone. But he still saw her before, glances her way when she was the last person through a doorway, he waited.)

Out of the crypt now (the underground never bothered him, the suffocating metal, the windowless walls can all be adapted to), he thinks he can breath, even in the expanse of space, it has more oxygen in it than the former Temple, screaming with ghosts, some walked above them. But, many of the ghosts, if we think of all the memories that happened in those vaults, all the people he’s passed by, Orion is among them. The ghost of a woman, he’s has to spread to his fingers out to find and she’d still slip past, relief in that she’s alive, if nothing else, for so long. Convincing himself, before he saw her face, that this relief was more than wishing for ghosts, it was real.

There’s a quiet moment, he holds his head barely above her shoulder, afraid of placing the weight there, before slowly settling in. He doesn’t see her nod, but he feels it, where his hair meets her chin, feels the movement. He doesn’t answer her outright, but he doesn’t move, and there’s easy breathing they can both hear now. He doesn’t say he doesn’t plan on moving unless she wants him to. “It’ll be a while before we’re back,” the Core Worlds to the Outer Rim, even with the hyperdrive on, they still must travel across a galaxy, “Will you sleep?" Quiet words, like he doesn’t want to speak, does for her anyway.

Homecoming doesn’t feel real. Coruscant sticks to her, a second skin, a recurring lucid dream. She is exhausted, but when she closes her eyes her mind brings her back there, a sickening jigsaw of childhood nostalgia and present-day monstrosities. Their shared past, now a perverted monument.

Instead, Orion focuses what little she has left to the signs of life erupting from Atticus’s body. Fragile warmth, shallows of breath, all accompanied by a weight that seems solid, that anchors her here as much as she supports it — finally, her half-gone mind sputters. Finally, she supports him.

When her voice escapes her throat it is hoarse from disuse. “I can’t.” Her unwound tape of a brain stops her, won’t reset until she sees Yavin IV again. She thinks she will sleep then, with the grass against her face and the sun overhead, anything to overwrite the memory of steel, cold and dead.

Strange, how a place she scorned as unfamiliar now serves as her only other beacon in the galaxy, aside from the man who towers over her and shrinks into her at the same time.

Rishla tips her head at Orion before stepping forward into the dark, arm outstretched, lightstick reflecting off of durasteel walls. Each one is lined with drawers, databanks filled with information. She peers down at her commlink and says aloud, “The maps identify this room as schematics.” Meaning: they shouldn’t touch any of these. They need to leave this place exactly as they found it, with no sign that there was anything tampered with.

Although Orion spat at her title as a Jedi when they last spoke, Rishla can pick out remnants of what she was taught. Orion moves like a shadow. Rishla knows the amount of training that went into it; Padawan to Spy, faceless and unknown.

It was not the way.

She allows the thoughts to slide over her like water as she breezes past the main circuit boards which control the Palace’s primary functions. “But…” Stopping in front of one of the last columns, she motions for Orion to stand beside her, holding out the glowstick to illuminate the labels. “If we can access the correct files without triggering any alarms, perhaps we could retrieve more accurate blueprints of the Vaults.”

They could always abandon this venture for the sake of safety, which would leave them wandering around in the dark with only Fulcrum’s outdated information to aid them.

Her gaze slants sideways before it lands on the Knight. (Wants to ask her what she’s compartmentalizing for the sake of the mission, wants to tell her that it will break the surface eventually, as all things must. But there’s no time, not right now.) She lifts an eyebrow, the motion asking: can you make anything of it?

Orion follows, Rishla’s cast as Rishla’s shadow in the dark. How strange, to once again act as part of a unit. She’d been a solo agent for so long, free to assess her own risks, cut her own corners, escape by the skin of her own teeth. There’d been no shared responsibilities, plans to communicate, or paths to carve. And certainly if she screamed, only the void would answer.

Jedha had not really felt like a team mission, hastily thrown together as it was, and no wonder it had failed so spectacularly. But Coruscant was different, even if it had its own particular fault lines. They moved together, split up and regrouped, communicated with hand signals thought up on the spot. It was messy and ad-hoc but somehow it still came together. She focused on what it was to move with them. She had to, because when she looked through a window and to the remains of the courtyard where she’d spent countless hours drilling her forms, punched another youngling in the face, stared after a handsome boy in another creche, she nearly turned to stone.

Maybe Rishla felt the same way, for all her laser focus on the objectives, the problems to solve, the protocols that would ensure their success. The present needed to be relentless to escape the ever heightening tides of the past.

She supposed Rishla’s quiet, but decisive leadership was to thank for that, along with a far more experienced team. They behaved like professionals, because unfortunately they were. That professionalism lead Orion to nod, just once, the edge of her face just barely illuminated.

Another key, another few tap-tap-taps in the dark as Orion fiddles with an interface that lives on the edge of hardware and software. As her body warred between the present and the memories, her movements were stiff. Even so, the drawer beeps quietly under her ministrations and slides out. She plugs her datapad into the exposed hard drive, locates what they need, and disconnects. The drawer shuts. Lucky again, but Orion knew luck wouldn’t hold.

The light goes out for just a moment as she disengages her saber and spins off the momentum, hoping to land in Mathias’s blind spot. They called Trakata Dark, but Orion calls it pragmatic.

Death wish. Curious. Fear of so little except what he can’t do. That a body will only keep on healing, in the end. So he’s chasing it until he can bleed. Laughs with all his teeth. Call it whatever you want. There’s a pull in his chest, for this night not to end, because he likes the way she shows her own teeth. Something to chase. Something to bare. Pulling at threads. He can live in the reflections of yellow against his blades, against her eyes.

We can compare them so well, but we’ve never mentioned sabers. The same yellow they share, even if his is not in his hands, and he doesn’t know if it will be again, can’t guarantee he’ll ever be deemed worthy of his rank, of the Jedi. But the one he stole, it was her color, claimed. The color of the old Temple Guards, of protectors, of shields before someone thinks they can enter the fortress. Does a legacy find itself in them? Or have even they not found it yet?

A smile with all teeth, back when she spits at him, preparation in his gaze, in the way his shoulder’s roll back, the way he leans forward. A fighting style that says he’s had learned by fighting for his life. "No time to get tired, but you already know that, or do you need somemotivation?“ Blades clash, the heat of a saber close to his face, he can almost smell the burn—unable to tell if its his imagination or his cheek.

When the saber goes out, the yellow light, he pauses, but not for long—long enough only for his breath to catch, long enough to take the hit, but he doesn’t go down alone, flipping them both of them on the ground, same force and pain. “How about that motivation?”

Orion saw a video once, of wolf pups tangled up in each other. Play fighting, the narrator called it, though it seemed rather vicious with the bloodied teeth and snarling. Better, though, to lose that kind of fight to a brother who would show you mercy than to an outsider who wouldn’t. That reminds her of this moment, when the ground knocks the air from her lungs. The old masters would have stopped a fight like this on Coruscant. Too much passion! Control yourselves! Remember the Code!

What use is a code when you are always fighting to survive? This is the honed brutality she and Mathias share and that so many others lack. Turns out, the underworld gave them useful lessons to go along with all the pain. Sadly, they were taught how to survive just to continue living a mere shadow of an existence. And now? It remained to be seen.

Orion wrests herself from Mathia’s hold, rolls, and scrambles ungracefully to her feet. She’s not ashamed that her hair sticks to her forehead, or that her breath comes out more like a grunt.

“As if I need an overgrown boy to motivate me.” She fires the lightsaber again, even twirls it in her palm just to taunt him. If someone stumbled across them, they might wonder why the two Jedi were fighting so hard, baring their teeth, behaving like feral creatures, on temple grounds.

Orion could not answer for Mathias, but she knew that battle was when she became herself— a pure thing, unburdened by guilt, rules, systems. She began and ended in a point of light, a symbol he’d been conspicuously missing since Jedha. Maybe dragging her into a duel to collapse was how he could feel it again, or forget at least dull its absence.

     “ bang, bang, to the roof         where we smashed the satellites & the fuse box too —                                                       our sharp teeth are the only light                                                       I drank the whole moon dry. ”

.orion sula-raeth (”wanted”, “lost”) // ages seventeen to twentyone.           position: everywhere but home

He almost waits for it—do you see it in the way his eyes search her own, the way he looks to her cheeks, waiting for laughter, waiting for the sound. Flash to a time that wasn’t easier than it is now, they were just too young to feel the weight of it all, yet. Yet. Her laughing at him, and bright eyes looking back, unbothered. Him waiting in the ship that would bring her home from another mission. There is no laughter now, and he has nothing to wait for.

But they are more than their past, no matter all the chains it holds around their ankles, their wrists, their hearts. There is now, as undefinable as it is, they must live it. And he knows best that time doesn’t do anything but make the scabs bleed more, the more he picks at them. He only got used to the bleeding.

He lets go of her when she speaks, fingers slipping away quietly, skin ghosting against skin. He knows she already knows, perhaps already knows more than he does about his missions within the Rebellion, about his life here, the last life he has. Too-seeing eyes meet a too-seeing mind. He doesn’t answer her question.

There’s a time before he speaks, even if he doesn’t believe the words, even if there’s a knife in the wound he’ll believe he placed, “What about the ones that didn’t—that didn’t die? What about the ones that stay alive?” He’s still standing, “I can’t tell you anything, anything about the future, Orion,” because the state the galaxy is in now, or the way his hands tremble in the night, the way the overnight patients look at him in the morning stepping out of the offices. Do you see the way he avoids their eyes? “I’d just rather be here when the galaxy explodes.” He’d be a doctor, even as he dies.

Orion might have howled, a beast in pain. Because in some sense, he is right. For all his fatalism masquerading as faith, Atticus Prior is right. She forces herself steady where a moment ago she was madness. Still she shakes, but maybe that’s just the first stumbling breaths of withdrawal.

He watches her and she gets the distinct sense that maybe he is really watching her from a different time, a dual vision that they share from moments worlds apart and somehow familiar. They run along parallel tracks, never quite able to escape the long shadows of before, even as a new future rises to blind them.

She can’t bring herself to say back, I’d be here with you. To stay, but not for any lofty cause or sense of duty — just to be by his side, the way he sits now by hers. Has sat. Will always. Orion knows she is not so special; this is just who Atticus is. And that is why she would.

“I suppose I don’t have much choice, then.” And finally she looks at him, her next words as unsteady as her gaze itself is the muttering of a promise. “But to make sure it doesn’t.”

DATE & TIME: 1/17, 7:30AM LOCATION: Rebellion Ship back to Yavin IV TAG: @accessdecried

There is an exhaustion here, even if you don’t listen to it. Feel it, in the way the air moves. The way he’s not sure anyone speaks among themselves. The way he’s not sure anyone looks the other in the eyes, stuck to their own worlds. His is nauseous, from another time unslept. The way the skin over his cheekbones stretches further, tight and thin.

There is a safe place he stays here, in the silence, when the voice of the night fades, but not its memory, not its feeling. He feels the night terrors as they crawl over his skin, find a place to hide from the light, but they don’t disappear, they wait.

The safe space here, when he can’t be alone, is beside Orion. Still quiet as he sits beside her. (The feeling of it, does it remind you of the couch set up in his home? Does it remind you of the cot in the medbay offices? The sticky notes on the wall?) Legs stretched out to their full length in front of him on the floor, his head begins leaned against the wall before it falls slowly to her shoulder, and he lets out a breath. He didn’t think about and part of his mind berates him for it. The other part, is too tired to argue with it. So, he asks quietly, almost silent as he doesn’t compete to be heard over the ship’s engines, “Is this okay?”

Orion has lost all sense of time in the vaults. She is adrift, away from herself. She stares into the darkness and somehow it consumes her. Awake and aware and yet somehow unseeing. She cannot meditate, and she cannot sleep, but somehow she can still manage to become nothing at all.

When they first realized they were sealed in, there was a moment of panic which aged into resignation, which itself became a restlessness even in sleep. A batch of runaways forced to stay still. How impossible, and how ridiculous. They drifted from each other in the dark, revisiting their own fraught memories of this school, this sacrament, this crypt. And somehow Atticus finds his way back to her, her spine against the wall near the corner of the room. These old habits.

They are like this, a moment forever on the verge of tipping over, the thinnest of lines between restraint and chaos. They balance even in the dark, even on the battlefield, even amongst the wreckage afterward. So somehow, when his weight falls on her she knows exactly how to bear it. To an almost unasked question, she nods just so, just enough that her jaw shifts strands of his hair.

DATE & TIME: 1/16, 2100H   LOCATION: The Vaults TAG: @accessdecried

The presence of the other Inquisitors in the Palace hangs over them, thick and suffocating in its darkness. They should have been back on Yavin IV by now. But the Vaults are sealed shut behind them; any attempt to break through and make their way back to the surface would certainly result in a breach.

It goes without saying that they would certainly perish were that to happen. (A morbid thought: how fitting would it be to die in this place, years after Order 66.) She stands from where she had seated herself to meditate, adjusting the strap where her saberstaff is hooked from across her shoulder to her hip.

“Sula-Raeth,” Quietly said into the dark, voice sounding tinny within the durasteel confinement. “With me.” She’d go alone, but Orion is their slicer. The Vaults are a maze; each of the blaster doors locked tight.

Rishla untucks one of the light sticks from her utility belt and cracks it against the corner of a durasteel wall. It casts the its weak, sickly green glow over the both of them. She knows Orion isn’t sleeping, has no intention to. Rishla’s said nothing to her on this mission so far besides giving orders; but she can see it on her face. Compartmentalization is a valued skill, especially on missions like these—but Orion has always been a lightning rod of sorts, a point break, and there comes a time where the divisions placed between task and emotion can only crack.

She allows her eyes to settle on the younger woman before she nods to the end of the corridor. “Shall we?”

Orion likens the vaults to a tomb. She had never been down here, too young and unruly in her Padawan days to ever be granted access to the Jedi’s most sacred knowledge. Even then, after leaving Coruscant the first time, Orion had little desire to turn back.

Until now. Locked away together with the knowledge kept from her for so long. The only thing that stood between her and an eon of philosophy were a few doors. From her perch at the corner of the room she had been eyeing the depths of the vaults, a pitch black corridor leading to parts unknown. Sleep was nothing to a woman once hunted.

And then she hears Rishla’s voice, sees the corners of her form ascend. They’d discarded the titles after Jedha. The way Orion spit them out even before the disaster, it was for the best. A thin glow blankets them, and the Master has granted her a new mission. This way of communicating is easier. It reminds her of her youth; one foot in front of the other, until the objective is complete.

Orion merely nods, her footsteps at first heavy for the sake of the other Jedi in the room with them in various states of unsleep. They slowly fade to nothing, the practice of a child trained to spy, to transmogrify from body to living lockpick. “No time like the present.”

Orion readies the decryption keys, she had prepared for the mission, slotting one into the blast doors at the end of dark hallway, working by Rishla’s light. The tiny circuit board sticks out from the keypad, triggers springing from it like one of those ancient typewriters. Orion adjusts it slightly, and the doors open for them. “After you.” She slides low under her natural tone.

He hears it as it happens, her breath—now louder than the ship’s engines, for him, now all he can focus on, until it’s too loud at all. Feel in his chest a worry born of simply knowing her, and another born of that breath. He tries to hold onto her, both fear she’ll move away too soon, fear what she’ll think him stopping her, so as she moves away he holds onto two of her fingers only, not her hand, not her wrist, before going shock still.

He feels the shaking go through him, starting at the fingers. He stands then too, has to crouch to not hit his head against the ceiling, leans anyway to see her face better as she shakes. Quiet, in the way he listens, in the way his brows knit together, let them speak for him, shifting from his shock still place when she touches the wound, and his hand moves to stop her, eyes wide. “Do you want it to mean something?” He asks, looking at the wound and not her right then. The other things he doesn’t know how to speak of yet, no one has to ask him to do anything.

There’s a long time he doesn’t answer, for several reasons. “I—I don’t have one.” And he doesn’t. Rarely in Atticus’ life has he done things he wants to do, instead does what he feels is needed. Goes where he thinks people need a doctor, it’s not about want, he doesn’t think of it, at all, doesn’t think of it now either. (He does want to be here, but the reason is rarely personal.) “I’ve been the Rebellion twelve years, there’s no where for me to be.”

Atticus Prior, for all he seems like he’d rather recede into the walls, was born too kriffing tall to do so. Irony. If this moment weren’t what it is, she might have laughed — a long distance had passed since the two of them were last cramped on a ship together, flying into the heart of chaos, stars still bounding in their eyes.

Now, Orion looks at his hands around her fingers, anchoring her in the now. Otherwise she might have lost herself in missions long past, battles since sundered, friends since buried and all of them alike in how they contain moments to retrospect, to wonder why and how it all went wrong. Funnily enough, they never do get easier.

She cannot look at him, his too-seeing eyes. They stand and speak tethers, instead. “Twelve years, Attie.” And she read this in his file but it’s different coming out of his mouth. “Don’t you ever wonder what it means?”

And she’s talking all at once now, the words jumbling in her mouth. “I know you want to save people, that’s what you do, but you can’t save us all and when you can’t, when someone is left behind or there’s a pain you can’t heal I wonder— what did they die for?