#sahley

“You have to let go of excusing every evil thing that happens simply because you don’t care to do anything.”

Friyr hadn’t spoken much to Sahley on their trek back to Eedit. He regarded the mountain as meditative. The journey to it as spiritual. Friyr merely counted himself present for the experience of returning to it. Each beath was hard won as the altitude rose and his thighs quivered with the exhaustion of a well-walked day. Chirping birds, bats, and insects filled the air, and the Force filled his mind. All consuming and yet clear, like cold rain in the middle of a tropical day.

The steps built into the mountainside eventually turned into flat rock platform, and Friyr knew they had arrived. He sat in the dirt, refusing to walk further than they had. He waved a hand. “Go go. I’ll catch up,” he said breathlessly.

Someone hesitated but turned and left the Jedi to his sitting. Friyr looked out over the dusky blue sky without any notion of what he was seeing, but he knew that it felt beautiful. The Force that resided inside him told him as much.

He knew this in the same way Sahley sounded like water. Though that was all Friyr knew about Sahlye anymore.

___

Friyr tied the hair in his eyes up into a scruffy tail atop the crown of his skull. It stuck out like bristlebrush and the shorter pieces fell out in messy little strands over his ears, but visual appearance had never mattered much to Friyr’s vanity. And Friyr was a vain little creature.

Eedit’s basement was silent as the stone it was made of and so was Alema. Friyr let out a breath and listened to the gentle reverbrations off the walls. Stone was both ugly and beautiful. The concepts were not separate in Friyr’s mind. It made horrible sounds, offered no gentle touch, but it too offered security. It was the lifeblood of trade, organic life. Thus was how Friyr judged beauty.

He closed his blue eyes. That they remained open was more courtesy than need.

He unhooked the lightsaber from his belt and switched it on. It was smooth. Friyr could feel the blade extending through the hilt in the pads of his fingers. The beam of light arched through the different lens into the mouth of emitter - where it errupted into sound and color. The hum of the blade traveled into the bones of his arm, wrapping it in a kind of power.

Friyr flexed his wrist, straightening it into a proper grip and breathed in. The light was faint against his translucent eyelids. Red had a way of doing that. Even the fuzzy purple blade he’d modified from a ready-made hilt was brighter. And, for that - though he’d never seen it - Friyr considered the color red pretty. Beautiful in fact. Though, it had never been his luckiest color.

From red heads, to red skin, to an Empire drenched in the red of blood.

“Ready?” his old master asked.

The sound of her skirt made a  muffled shush against the floor as she widened her stance and switched her own lightsaber on.

“Course.”

She waited, balanced on the balls of her feet, and Friyr took the opening. Simple as a game of chess played a thousand times, but complicated as they played it once more. The moves were old, but the construction of the fight was unique and evolving as the players.

Friyr met resistence against his lighsaber, tasted the heat of sparks against his sun damaged cheeks.

She shoved him back, and Friyr spun off the momentum, slashing quickly at her flank. She caught him, but the crackles of energy were loud. Friyr’s hilt jumped under his palm. He’d caught her at the emitter. He adjusted the angle. Alema’s catch slipped, and Friyr siezed the chance to sweep one hand from its purchase on the hilt.

She grunted, and Friyr smirked. It was a short lived although sweet victory as a wall of Force caught him in the chest. The breath knocked clean from his body. So he thought until he hit the floor and the remaining air fizzled from his lips.

“Ow.”

“I’ve seen you Sun Djem Sahley too often,” Alema remarked about the beforetimes as she waited for him to get up.

Not Sahley. Friyr wanted to talk about anyone but the revolutionary little Mirialan. Sahley’s heated words stung fresher than the ache Alema had rattled into Friyr’s lungs.

“Sometimes I forget Sahley had a lightsaber,” Friyr groaned from the floor. He’d be feeling the impact in his left side tomorrow morning. The penalties of age.

“I doubt that,” Alema said in her blunt innocent way. “You had a nickname for him derived from his lightsaber.” She paused. “I don’t remember what it was quite.”

Friyr groaned and coiled his legs. “Dukarte Vidta.” He srung up and stepped into a low cut at Alema’s midsection, that she predictably blocked. He didn’t throw his full weight into the blade lock. His lightsaber sprung off of it going high. “Means Double-Saber.”

Alema grunted again in exteriton as he forced her to windmill the heavy lightsaber. Friyr grimaced as well. His back wasn’t what it used to be. But she was feeling it too. He muscled through the pain into a  step forward, and she stepped back. A hot pole of energy burned Friyr’s abdomen in sacrifice for the ballsy move. He skittered back a half-step and wobbled.

“You two were close,” Alema mused. Friyr felt his face flush. “He misses you sometimes, you know.”

Friyr sacrificed the whole step forward for four back as Alema jabbed at him again. He had a good position, but the conversation was making him feel...some type of way. He circled at a safe distance around to her other flank, trying to place her back up against the wall.

“Sahley an’ I don’ really get along too well anymore, Alema. S’in the past.”

A sour feeling rose in his gut that had little to do with the fight.

“Sahley is too passive, and you’re too quick to judge a situation.”

Friyr half-shrugged and pressed the attack, knowing that a victory wasn’t possible with his guts full of nostalgia, acridity, and tinges of wistful desire.

“Sahley’s torn up about some stuff I did like years ago. Things I can’t change. And-- I suck at apolo--” Something hard caught him in the middle. “--gies.”

Alema had used the wall as leverage to kick off of, putting Friyr back on the ugly stone floor. He didn’t get back up, instead choosing to catch his breath.

“Geeze.”

Alema’s footsteps ran up his spine as she walked to him. Her lightsaber retracted.

“If you can help him move on from something he’s attached to...”

She leaned down. Friyr could feel the heat of her hand over his skin. He took it.

“It’s my compassionate duty to,” they finished together. “Yeah, yeah. Good talk.”

Alema slapped Friyr on the back good-naturedly. With her hand. Her heavy, strong, broad hand. 

“Owwwwwwwwwwwww.”

“I-- Sorry.”

“‘M like tiny an’ old Alema, y’can’t just do that.”

“Work on your stance and maybe you’ll fall less.”

Friyr stuck his tongue out.

Friyr deposited the fluffed blanket onto his mattress. Another amidst the silky green fabric he’d picked up on Corellia and the plump pillow he’d found on Alderaan. Small trinkets in addition to the simple beddings he’d stripped from the temple. They were nothing fancy if of quality make. A Jedi lived in moderation perhaps, but Friyr had a lifetime of sheets that kept just enough of the chill out. He’d roughed it, endured desert nights and the swampy monsoon rains of Kaas in the wet season. He’d lived on simple cots full of molding straw and threadbare weave. Then there had been the simple white pallet.

Friyr closed his eyes rather than remember that comfortable cruelty. He shook his head. He exhaled in the silence until his lungs emptied. The tap of his index finger kept time with the breath until there was no more. A blanket of calm settled over his shoulders, making them heavy. Friyr wanted something a little bit more than learning to make do. Then again, he always did. 

He settled into what was quickly becoming a nest of blankets and soft things with a heavy sigh. s he reached for his pillow, the back of his knuckles grazed something cold and hard. He stroked his fingertips over the metal surface, knowing intuitively the touch of his friend even at the most unexpected moments. There was a soft warmth to the cold buried under layers of NM-1′s hibernating circuitry. Friyr patted him gently, then forewent the pillow, pushing it beneath his head, to pull him arms around the droid instead. The metal edges pressed into his forearms; a cold snowdrop against his heart and belly for a moment. 

He was home. Friyr absently stroked the carapace. It was lonely in the absence of company. Bendo left with Master Tabris’ new apprentice, leaving Friyr alone again. NM hummed gently in his arms and Kyuga’s breaths were clear across the small dwelling. Friyr was not a lonely man in any respect, but the feeling sank in during the between times with an ardent need to be felt.

Friyr squeezed the droid unconsciously and gazed at the dim gray in his vision reflected from moonlight spread over NM’s hull. He knew the semblance of things that were said about his recent absences. The prolonged galaxy tramping that took him to the edges of wild space and turned the council into a distressed collection of tinny voices over the holofrequency. 

Friyr’s a free spirit; Troubled; I don’t think Friyr knows how to care about people who care about him.

It didn’t bother him, but he knew that in some way they danced around a knot of unsettled reasons all snarled together in a ball of discontent. He didn’t think that the galaxy would undo them, but the challenge of finding his way back home had occupied a troubled heart for a while.

Friyr had quickly learned that Force bonds were not lightly made for the sole reason provided in the ache of separated hearts. He had said goodbye in ten different ways every morning and evening to Kurt Wax, known what they shared was a fluke of proximity, and yet. Yet. It still hurt feeling the intensity of an emotion Friyr had never known from the man given to another. Someone Friyr didn’t know beyond Kurt’s stray feelings and dreams where Friyr imagined himself a watery version of the Pureblood. But he knew enough to know that Kurt had finally fallen in love.

It was the reason he’d leaned over with a smirk and bitten into Sahley’s fruit all those months ago. Friyr hadn’t really expected to be led out onto a porch by the hand and asked if he felt the sun on his skin. He’d slept with the man as a sort of flippant pasttime only to have that flippancy flipped on its head by a particularly tender Republican. 

Friyr didn’t know what he felt for Sahley other than an infrequent need to hold him or steal a kiss when they were alone. To be around him. Sometimes Friyr wondered in particularly painful moments - where he could feel Kurt’s heartbeat a little too strongly - if Sahley was a key - not to twist in a lock - but to wedge against the fabric of the Force bond as a makeshift knife and sever the ties. 

It was that alone that convinced Friyr he didn’t deserve stolen kisses or the precise time of day from the tenderhearted soul. Friyr wedged space between the two. Rebuffing Sahley’s need to reaffirm their tender friendship with a firm shove instea. Friyr had never shared something so gentle with a friend before. But it had felt so right to not call the mirialan his own but rather someone he expressly cared for just a little bit more than he did for others. Sometimes a very silly part of him that was always running off on fantasies about giving boys flowers would doubt with a certain sincerity that bruising their friendship - not letting things progress into a comfortable but ultimately platonic intimacy with the potential for more - was wrong. It was easier to listen to that part of him while Master Tabris grieved the death of her late husband, her one love. It was easier to pine for someone to care for Friyr the way she had wanted Rajjaet to care of her.

Friyr left. Confused, anxious, and with too much time on his hands - he pulled on the green cloak Teran had given him, strapped his lightsaber on, and went to try and be a Jedi the best he knew how. He settled a few disputes on Carrick station by placing his body between others and flashing the lightsaber on his hip without revealing once its color. 

He had a panic attack in Nar Shaddaa, then fell in love with the bastions of opportunity and freedom the Hutts cultivated, while also finding poverty of the worst kinds that made his giddiness an uncomfortable feeling. 

Wild Space held people he had once sought for. Friendly, dishonest, and genuine to a fault. Friyr had stayed there longer than he liked to admit. The aliens and humans there reveling in an unjudging company that cared very little about Jedi, Sith, or some down on their luck spacer. For a few days there was no war; just people who understood the gripe of being alive.

He came back, and Kurt was still tied somewhere behind his naval, Sahley no doubt lingered - but he was just grateful to be home. In truth, the wide galaxy scared him as much as it fascinated. 

“Never took you for a reading person.”

Sahley drew back from the holoshelf. His boot heels echoed throughout the hush of the archives. At least Friyr hoped the ginger and tan blur was Sahley; this would get very awkward very quickly, if it wasn’t.

“I dabble on occasion,” a masculine but ultimately tender voice murmured.

Friyr smiled, the scars on the sides of his mouth tensed with the motion.

“I do too; when I can get someone to read to me.”

Sahley let the archives speak for him a second. Friyr could hear holos humming into the dusty silence. Tython held ages, and Sahley held Friyr’s attention in that pause. Something about the softness of his character was novel and enrapturing. Even his silences. “Well some people say that droids are a ‘someone’ too, though I understand that the human to interface connection isn’t quite the same.”

Friyr’s smile widened.

“Georgie is a someone, but he don’t really like reading.”

“That’s a shame.” Sahley paused a beat. “I like reading.”

__

Friyr braced his back against Sahley’s chest. He could feel the trunk of the tree through the terseness in the other man’s form and the way his body moved to compensate for its shape. The Mirialan’s legs splayed on either side of him. Friyr used his left shin as a perch for his ankle, occasionally scuffing the top of the man’s boots with his sole. Sahley pushed back, his lips puffing bitten back laughs against Friyr’s hair.

His spine curved into the broader man’s shape, rising and falling with his shortened breaths. As he sank into the weight, he sank into a memory where he was braced the same way against another person. His hands rested on top of a claw tracing the lines for him as he read. Kurt had been dreadfully concerned that his slave couldn’t read. He found that it was impossible for Friyr to read with his eyes after more than one strenuous test that slave had been forced to humor the little boy through. Kurt’s decision to save Friyr from the tyranny of a hololess life was that he would simply have to recount these magical stories to Friyr.

The stories he was read were pilfered from his mother’s library of blackmarket books for “research” purposes. These had been Kurt’s favorites. They often confused and frustrated Friyr who bit his tongue about why a such things would happen, the practicality about reading stories of things that had never, could never, and would never happen. He preferred listening to Lord Ignolis read the holonews.

But it was through books that Friyr had, in his middling child years - where he was neither adult nor child – discovered a ruthless gentleness in his master, Kurt Wax. He was soft, sensitive, idealistic as much as he was spoiled and wicked. And in turn, Friyr had pushed Kurt’s cogs with stray statements, quiet enthusiasm, and holos. Though… he could not read them.

Friyr hefted the sack of feed over his good shoulder and waited for his ‘deficiencies’ to catch up. It was almost dusk, and the light waned low but still bright. On Kaas, it would’ve been pitch by now, but Ambria was merely a filtered low gray. Friyr didn’t depend on sight anymore than a Miraluka did. The dirt smelled pungent from the heat rapidly cooling the sand as though bringing out the smell of the musty underlayers. It coated his nose and made it dry. He carried grain into the storage sheds, while dragging his limp left foot in a trail behind him. The instep pressed into the dirt, which wedged into a clod in his sandal. It made the connection between his hip to his knee to the ground firmer than if he tried to support it on a flat sole.

Water lapped in his ears, and the oro-birds’ racous clucking settled into a murmur. Nights on Ambria were silent. Friyr knelt onto on knee and heaved the bag forward over his shoulder, almost going prostrate as he used his full body for what would’ve taken only the upper arms for a normal man.

“I can’t do it yet, Master.”

Elutherius’ skin burned. He didn’t need sight to know his wrists were a raw red, blistered bubbling on the surface of a red tattoo shaped into the Imperial seal. The palms of both of his hands felt raw where the edges of the lightsaber pressed into his skin. He resisted the urge to manacle his hands around them and rub the ache away.

“Look at me.”

Elutherius lifted his head in the gray darkness to the hulking silhouette.

“Look at me.”

Elutherius closed his eyes, pulled the weariness from his bones, like Quirt had asked just one more thing of him on an already bone-weary day, and drew in a shaking draught of Force.

When he opened them, his vision flickered blearily between the lines of blindness and unnatural sight that the rods and cones should never have been capable of. Blurred watercolor blended with sharp seven feet lines of wine-dark Massassi.

Elutherius met the yellow eyes.

“Good, Apprentice. Explain why you can’t.”

His Master’s tone was sharp. Businesslike. Urgent.

Elutherius was seventeen, though he looked younger than that.

“I need a smoother grip to fit my hands and—” Elutherius pulled his shirt up without a lingering trace of shyness for his body. He caught a glance at his hard but gawky teenage muscles fit on a slender frame still filling out and at the same time losing the last bits of babyfat clinging to the Korriban sinew. He was smooth. Pale. New blemishes of spotty brown freckled over his stomach and shoulders but they were healing into peeling skin. A few, very few pink scars traced what had been deep scabby gashes over his ribs.  They caved in as though broken and unset in healing, like his face. A warped dip.