Okay you're getting nine line breaks from Fragments of a Life chapter 2 because I need to de-hibernate that and you've already seen most of the coherent Kohl snibs.
And you're gonna fucking like it.
"Because you'll disappear again," says Vokara. "Maybe in a week, maybe in a year, but you'll vanish, and she'll have to get used to you being dead all over again, right when she's let herself get used to you being alive. Just stay dead, Qui-Gon. If you ever cared about Tahl, stay dead. Don't do that to her."
The warm air of the medcentre turns icy under Vokara's cold stare. In this room, she has a healer's ruthlessness, where anything standing between her and her current patient's full recovery is merely an obstacle to be overcome. Right now, Qui-Gon is an obstacle. But there's something else behind that steely resolve, something with the devouring empty cold of a collapsed star: fear. Vokara is terrified that Tahl is going to die, a terror too huge and paralysing to release in the Jedi way, not without hours of patient meditation. Vokara doesn't know — and won't learn, because it's not the Jedi way, not really — how to crush down that fear of losing Tahl and use the fear for power.
"You love her," Qui-Gon accuses her.
"Of course I do," snaps Vokara. "Everyone loves Tahl. But not everyone has had to pick up the pieces every time you had a meltdown and called her in the middle of the night to fix it for the past —Force, it's been twenty years. Not everyone has had Tahl sobbing on their shoulder every night for a week after you were declared dead. I have been taking care of her for far too long to let you hurt her again now. You need to leave."
"She went to you." Every time? Every time he called her from the road because it was Tahl or oblivion? Every time… she went and told it all to Vokara?
"She had to go to someone," Vokara says drily, but before Qui-Gon can ask how much she knows, how far Tahl’s been betraying him all these years, they're interrupted.
Vokara glances past Qui-Gon to the medcentre door, and nods for someone standing there to come in. It's a Human boy, one who looks too young to have his Padawan braid already brushing his shoulder. The boy's skin is the same warm deep brown as his perfectly-aligned cloak, his tightly-curling hair neatly cropped to a length even Dooku would approve of, and… there are a lot of thread and bead markers on the Padawan braid, each commemorating a significant achievement. Someone's model Padawan. The kind of Padawan Dooku would approve of. Has Dooku taken a new apprentice?
"Master Che. Master Yoda sent me. For…" the boy's dark eyes flick to Qui-Gon, but the uncertainty in the trailed-off sentence doesn't extend to his Force aura — there's nothing there but a calmly intense assessment, all judgment withheld. This boy is much older than he looks, Qui-Gon decides. There's a depth to his presence that only comes with experience.
"Thank you, Mace," Vokara says quickly. "Well, it looks like you're going at least as far as the Council chamber," she tells Qui-Gon. "Master Yoda’s Padawan Mace Windu here can show you the way. Since you've probably forgotten it."
Uhhhhh you've already tagged a lot of my friends but let's try @navigatorwrongway, @thatlittleegyptologist who is working on something cool just now, double tags for @paleoleigh so maybe she'll do one of them, and no-pressures to @moltengoldveins and @mathsbian.
