The sentinel shifts the weight of her hips with the pull of a star’s gravity. Seungri wonders if she knows - if Bastila sees in herself the grandeur of infinity, heated and untested like a protoplanetary disc, still tumultuous and unformed. She survived the Dark Lord, but there is so much of her that sings to Seungri as raw beneath the cool, tempered edges of a Jedi’s measured tone. She thrives in it, what she senses there that has been untouched, that remains wholly hers.
She pulls back, thrown off her careful internal balance in the seeing of things that can’t be seen, and reels at how she had done it. But she is staid, and rights herself with startling ease, folding her mental composure as collected as the expression that tacks her features mildly in place. She cannot guess at the Jedi’s ability to read her - a sensate, beholden to mental powers of terrifying acuity.
—— But in her stolen glimpses, Seungri saw hesitation, too.
‘ They aren’t much. I would have just called it intuition, but now I know better. ’ Truth, yes, and spoken with absolute clarity and conviction. But she lies by what she keeps, possessed of a sudden cautiousness bred by the doubt she feels she sees. Bastila is a wonder she cannot name, hard for her to pin down, to plumb the full sum of her being as she so naturally sorts with all else. She’d thought it useful, a scout’s keen trick of observation. And she runs short.
There is murkiness here, an uncertainty that bleeds internal and makes her doubt herself. And this is alien, an inchoate ambivalence, like piloting through roiling fog with no navigation but for the surety of her gut and the firm, guiding hands upon the controls.
So she clips her tongue, speaking in measured and open timbre, even as she draws a veil over the truth. She gives of herself but little, but shares a placating smile, nearly belated but not quite.
‘ I doubt it will make much difference now. ’
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