"Owww," Narasi said as she limped out of the refresher, wearing only sleep pants and a loose top over her burns. "Just…so much ow, Master."
"I warned you," Tirien said.
She stuck her tongue out. "When I woke up, I smelled like…remember that swamp basement muck we went through on Toprawa? That's what I smelled like."
Tirien wrinkled his nose to tease her a little. "Yes, I noticed too, what with being within a hundred-meter radius…"
"Ha ha." She gave him a daggered look that she sheathed when he offered a bowl of breakfast paste in each hand. "Thanks, I'm starved."
"What is that?" Zaella asked.
Narasi turned it a few different ways, took a deep breath in through her nose, winced and held a hand to her side, and then guessed, "Hmm…Number Five?"
"I'm pleased to know my cooking is recognizable," Tirien said.
Zaella stared, so Narasi added, "It's a food synthesizer, and it only has so much variety. Five and Six are breakfast."
Zaella raised her tattooed eyebrows, but then shrugged and took her bowl. She did not thank Tirien, but he let it go; she had not yet showered, and he suspected she would come down from her ryll high soon. When Tirien collected his own bowl, Zaella sat a little apart from them on the deck. Gizmo emerged from hiding when Narasi offered him a wire Tirien pretended not to notice.
"So where're we going?" Narasi asked. When Tirien gave her a look, she said, "Guudria, I know! I mean, where is this place?"
More pleased with that question, Tirien took a bite, pulled out his imagecaster while he was chewing, plugged it into his datapad, and projected a holomap of the galaxy. "Here—far down the Despot's Arm, in Resh-19."
Narasi choked, coughing several times before she swallowed and held her side with gritted teeth. "Ugh. Coughing's a bad idea. But Resh-19? Is there even anything there?"
"There's at least one thing there." He traced a line down. "The Triellus Trade Route takes us a little out of the way, but it's the quickest way down. We'll come out at Arkanis, jump down the Corellian Run toward Naos, and—"
This time it was Zaella who hacked on her breakfast, pitching forward on one hand to steady herself. Tirien looked at them both askance. "Perhaps take smaller bites, ladies…"
Narasi gave him a sour look, but when she finally got her throat clear Zaella sat up with a face full of fear. "That would go right past Ryloth!"
"Yes, it would," Tirien confirmed with a glance at the map. When Zaella's eyes widened, he added, "I wasn't planning on stopping."
"I didn't think a big bad Sith like you would spook so easy," Narasi said.
Tirien kept himself from sighing with rather more effort than Narasi usually demanded of him this early in the day. If she had been hoping to get Zaella past fear, he had to admit she had succeeded, but if the goal was to replace fear with calm…
"You don't know her," Zaella snarled. "You don't know what she can do."
"You don't know what he can do," Narasi countered, tipping her head toward Tirien. "That stuff with the Ganks was nothing; even that thing with the blaster bolt was a parlor trick compared to—"
"All right, Padawan, that's very flattering, but quite enough," Tirien chided. He was all for Zaella getting past her fear of Hadan, not least because it struck him as the same cringing reaction an abused pet would show a raised voice. He also could not quite bring himself to consider stopping a blaster bolt in midair a parlor trick, though judging by the wide-eyed look of apprehension she wore, Zaella was prepared to believe it. Though he had not made up his mind about her and still felt awkward about her temporary incarceration, Tirien wondered what he had done to the girl to make her so afraid.
"You told me once that you'd kill her if you fought her," Narasi reminded him. "Did you mean it?"
"Yes," Tirien admitted.
"Do you think different now?"
Tirien sighed and gave her a warning look. "No. But we're not stopping at Ryloth, so it doesn't matter right now. Our concern is whatever's going on on Guudria."
Narasi nodded, and they ate in silence under Zaella's suspicious gaze. When Narasi finished, Tirien said, "We'll be on the Triellus for a while; shall we do our first round of healing meditation now?"
"Please," Narasi agreed. She looked at Zaella. "You gonna join us?"
The Twi'lek hesitated, but after a moment her cold mask covered the indecision. "I think I'll take that shower now."
Tirien said. "Watch your—"
"The lek tip, I got it," she snapped. "I'm the Twi'lek, I know how much it hurts."
Narasi's eyes narrowed, but Tirien raised two fingers to forestall her reply, and she let Zaella pass her in silence. When the refresher door sealed, Narasi took a couple shallow breaths through her nose, then nodded. "Okay, ready."
"In a minute," Tirien said, lowering his voice. "I want to talk to you in private first, and I'm not sure how many chances we'll get for the foreseeable future."
Frowning, Narasi glanced at the door, then scooted forward until they were almost knees-to-knees. "About her?"
"No; that is what it is. We need to talk about you." When Narasi raised her eyebrows in surprise, Tirien said, "You had nightmares last night, didn't you?"
She recoiled a little, disquiet joining the surprise. "I…yeah."
"If I had to guess, this one wasn't about shock whips and the slave processing center?" When Narasi swallowed and shook her head, Tirien added, "And not about your parents either?"
"…no."
"What did you see, Narasi?"
"I…" She shook her head. "It wasn't a vision, I remember what that's like. It was just a dream."
Tirien nodded, but pressed, "What did you see?"
Something shadowed the light in her big blue eyes; less than a meter between them, it was impossible to miss. She was silent for a long time, but Tirien waited her out until she whispered, "Him. Pavac."
Tirien was not keen to subject her to the entire experience again, not even a full day after the fight, but he thought his apprentice had taken a poisoned wound to her spirit. Extracting the poison would be painful, but leaving it alone could be fatal. Maybe her constitution was strong enough to fight it off alone, but he was not prepared to take that chance. "You held to the light in sparing Pavac's life, and I'm proud of you for that. But you left it to defeat him. You know that, don't you?"
She nodded, not meeting his eyes. "Yeah."
"What did it feel like?"
She squirmed. "I…I don't want to talk about it. Not yet."
"We've passed the point in our relationship when you could delay uncomfortable conversations," Tirien said, cooling his tone a little. Narasi winced, and when she looked up at him from under her brows, guilt was all over her face. "It's not my job to make you comfortable; if I never do anything else, I've failed. It's my job to make you a Jedi. You talked about your Jedi Trials? Go on, then—face the mirror."
Narasi gave a shaky sigh and combed her claws through her hair; her fingers stopped on the fire-charred spot where she had only a few centimeters of hair left. "It…it just came to me. He was taunting me about my parents, and I just snapped, and I wanted to kill him."
She made a face. "No…not just kill him, hurt him. He was just so…evil. Not just to my parents and me, but that whole thing with Saleucami, you could tell he didn't care. Even when he thought I was going to execute him he didn't have anything to say that was even a little bit remorseful."
"When you brought him down, how did you feel?"
"Strong. I've never felt so strong, Master. You heard all those horrible things he did, but I took him down anyway. I did that—me." She sounded scared and proud in equal measure, and her eyes filled with doubt. "I know some people are stronger than others, like you, but…but Master…"
She stopped, and Tirien sensed she needed the push. "At their cores, is the dark side stronger than the light?"
She nodded.
"No. It can seem that way," Tirien allowed. He empathized with his apprentice's struggle, having grappled with this same perception for years. "The dark side has so many powers geared toward combat and destruction, so many things that are easy to see, that it looks more powerful on the surface. But the power to take life isn't the measure of the depth of one's power."
"But what does the rest matter?" Narasi asked. "If the Force wants us to defeat the Sith—if we're supposed to be the barrier between the bad guys and everybody they want to hurt—isn't it the power to win duels and battles that matters? We can't just champion the light by meditating a lot; we're nobody's protectors if we're all dead."
"The light is about defense—preserving life instead of taking it. The dark side is offense, all about doing harm. But you can still win a fight on defense." He sought a good example. "Has Gatiin Muir taught you the pass-and-hook throw?"
Narasi's hands rose automatically, deflecting an invisible punch past her body and hooking the shoulder in the crook of her elbow for the takedown. "Yeah."
"Could you do that if someone didn't punch at you first?"
Her brows scrunched together, and Tirien suspected her Jedi Guardian aspirations were making her get creative. "Well…if you had the arm to begin with…yeah, maybe?"
"But it would be much more difficult, right? And it wouldn't feel at all natural?"
Her nod was slower this time; Tirien thought she suspected where he was leading her now.
"So it is with light and dark. The light can defeat the dark, when—and this is critical, Narasi—we remember its nature. The light doesn't exist to dominate or destroy; it doesn't seek to cause harm, and when it's forced to, it causes only so much as is needed to remove a threat to peace."
Narasi seemed half-convinced, but a ripple of agony and a pained cry from the refresher drew her attention. Narasi winced, and though he controlled his own expression, Tirien felt for Zaella too. He wondered what they could do to help her, if any help was possible.
"She's kind of a mess, Master."
"Yes, she is. But for better or worse, she's with us now."
Narasi grunted. "Wish I'd known she'd be coming along when she asked me for mercy…"
Tirien narrowed his eyes. "Would that have changed your decision?"
When she met his eyes, the moment of juvenile complaint evaporated. Her focus drew inward for a few seconds before she sighed and bowed her head. "No, Master."
"Good," Tirien said. "The light was never more with you during that battle than when Zaella begged you for mercy and you stayed your hand to give it to her instead of striking her down. The danger had passed and you knew it; anything but what you did would have been cruelty and murder."
"Yes, Master. I just…I like it when it's just us, y'know? Or somebody like Slejux who we know—and who's a good guy."
"I'm not disagreeing," Tirien admitted. "But if you want to be a Jedi Guardian someday, then you'd best learn sooner rather than later: you can't always swoop in, swing your blade, save the day, and have everything be better right away. Sometimes things take time to get better—sometimes a lot of time. I don't know that Mali ever learned that as a Padawan, but he's learning it now."
Tirien had not checked in with Mali in a couple weeks, but he knew things on Milagro were becoming untenable; something would have to give. Of course, having Khofin of Knylenn at the helm of the planet's civil administration was not a recipe for mutual trust and cooperation, but, having just instructed his Padawan about the temptations of the dark, Tirien did not want to dwell on one of his own shortcuts to annoyance. And, Khofin or not, Mali had gone to Milagro with far too rosy a picture of what the aftermath would yield.
Narasi wore the strained expression she often did when trying not to absorb a lesson that, deep down, she knew was right. Tirien gave her a moment to wrestle with it, then said, "Zaella's with us for the time being. Accept her presence as a chance to continue the good work you started—to recommit yourself to the light."
Narasi swallowed and nodded, but her eyes tightened. "Do you think we can save her? I mean…is that getting too arrogant?"
"Maybe 'redeem' is the word you want?" When she nodded, he said, "I don't know. If she was truly evil, she might have tried to kill us in our sleep; it's not exactly a demanding benchmark, but it's something. Then again, she's hardly a saint, either. We'll see what the Force reveals to us."
Nodding again, Narasi carefully rolled her burned shoulder, then asked, "Are we ready for meditation, Master?"
"Can you put Pavac—and even Zaella—out of your mind? It's no more than a logical extreme of curato salva, but it does require focus on the light."
Slowly, careful not to strain her cracked ribs, Narasi took a deep breath and blew it out again; Tirien was under no delusion that she had shed all darkness clinging to her, but her thoughts had cleared for the time being, and it was a start. "I'm ready, Master."
"Then let's begin…"