She took off both her lightsabers, the faint pink glimmer of the crystals within the only signs of life after the EMP pulse. They’d need to be repaired. This one could manage that. One was placed in Vie’s unconscious, yielding palm, the other tucked beside her.
It wasn’t hard to find a robe to swing over the ragged edges of her simple dress. Things the settlers shared or the Republic gave away to those in need.
Keep walking.
She didn’t enter the shuttle. Didn’t look back. Kept walking. Not heeding the faint crash and boom of artillery. The occasional, distant groans of straining metal in damaged buildings. Sometimes shots. Once in a while screams. Still she moved, walked, breathed, a silent hooded figure drifting through and past the rubble and bodies of the ruined cityscape.
Keep walking. Breathe.
There were a few, faint whiffs of memory. Of seeing the skyline as a very young child, the train tracks whizzing over head. A park. Animals, a zoo. These came, and passed, barely acknowledged. So many ruins. Such a place…thank the Force her parents were wise enough to leave when they did.
Die, Bedisa.
A hand reached out and supported her as she stopped and leaned against a pillar. Hateful whispers. Pain. What a foolish facade she’d tried to build up, and now it crumbled. She’d been focused. Thoughtful. She’d done her duty to her friends, done what she thought was the right thing, and now the aftermath washed over her.
Traitor. Betrayer. Disloyal.
She staggered on for a few more steps, and then kept walking, steady, forward, moving further and further into the abandoned outskirts. She didn’t care. It was finished. She didn’t care if he had lived, or died. Everything was empty. A pause. And that, of all things, could have been what drove her back to Tython. The stillness and peace of the place was tempting, oh, so tempting, but…no, not for her.
There is only the Force.
A piece of her was torn away, and she could feel a ragged, unkempt hole. Painful and bleeding life force, in it’s way. A cut off, cold feeling, that as she walked past the final of the taller skyscrapers, brought her to her knees in the rubble, leaning against a ruined wall. They had been one. He had shown her his path, his fire and passion and oh, how he’d been right in that way. They were stronger, they had been stronger, together. And now…nothing. She could not feel him. She could not sense him. Not an ounce of warmth. Not a touch of affection. And the power itself left her desolate in the dust.
There is only the Force.
The desert. How she craved it. The silence, the heat, and the nothingness. The pure peace of sand and sky and the Force radiating around her, within her. But now…she held up hands, wet with tears, and felt as if the power was draining away like water through a sieve. She had failed. First friends, then him, then…this. She had nothing. She kept moving. Had to keep moving. Had to breath. To be alone.
There is only…
Nothing.
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