SWTOR: Living with a Lie.

Bedisa looked out from her apartment window over the cityscape of Coruscant. Her calm was absolute. It must be. It must remain so. But it had been so hard to do lately.

Be the good girl. A model Jedi. A graduated knight, even at her age. Commendations during her schooling, high marks usually. Her early masters praised her calm and her meditative abilities. But she’d *thought*, too, and asked the questions, asked again and again till for all her apparent keenness the tutors and teachers and masters began to get uncomfortable.

She pulled her legs up onto the window seat and hugged her knees. Be a good Jedi. And she had been. She believed everything, at least on some level. And then she’d gone off world, had left Tython, and the wider galaxy had rolled over her like a landslide. Her private doubts came up in sharp contrast to her beliefs. Flaws. Theories. Ideas. Freedom…

Be a good Jedi…

Love. 

Hide. Live the lie. *Hide*. Survive, and don’t let them find out. Don’t let them find you. Love in secret.

She brushed away a tear. She would have to now, wouldn’t she? It stung, it went against her principles, but…she would have to hide, with him. She would have to bow her head and play at meekness, at contrition. She would be the good Jedi again. Scared straight, obedient. Submitting herself to a trusted Master’s good judgement and tutelage. She would hide her heart in their presence, bury it deep, but oh, didn’t the Jedi teachings make her so good at that. Hide it along with the pain their judgement caused. That, she thought, more then anything else. That pain. Heartbreak. 

The Order that she loved and trusted, the rules she followed despite her wandering ideas, to be so harsh. Cruel, it seemed. She understood the need for discipline, especially with wielders of power, but why? Why this?

Calm reigned again as speeders and clouds and fleeting specks of light darted back and forth. Heartbreak. She loved the Order, but she also loved him, and she discovered she never did things by half measure. He was…Sith. That, perhaps, could explain their harsh caution, and their cold judgement. After all, they had said such things about the Sith, her whole life. Boogeyman and monsters and a culture bent on pure destruction.

And yet, for him…

He was Sith. For his sake, for his soul, she would hide. She would remain strong in her silence. She would stand, and bow.

His past troubled her, and pained her heart. If she had uncertainty towards him yet it was only that, how to reconcile what he had done with what she loved now. Briefly she thought how *could* she love him, but she did, all the same, and now there was only thoughts of survival. What he had been, what he still was, in some part, could be addressed later. This was new, and raw, and painful. She would wait, quietly, and love, calmly, and be there when he needed it. Even for his son, she thought, she’d do that. For them both. 

“Please…don’t let them fall into darkness.” A faint, sad whisper. “Stand with them and keep them strong. I can watch myself. I have trust.” She drew her hood up over her head and began to fall into a deep trance. So it was.

May the Force be with them.