Solace
Amber Penglass
A Carth/Revan Snippit
Dirty and sweaty and beginning to feel the first pangs of hopelessness, she rememebred looking out over the back of Carth's pilot seat, over the harsh landscape of Korriban as Dreshdae had drawn nearer, remembered knowing it should have been an exhilerating knowledge, to know that their quest was nearly complete, that they were so close to achieving the knowledge they needed to thwart Malak. But with Bastila gone, dead or worse, the life had seemingly evaporated from the quaint crew of the Ebon Hawk, and she'd been, and still was, no exception. The sudden lack of determination and purpose had been evident when Carth hadset down in Dreshdae, his face more stony than Kalora -no, Revan- could remember seeing it. It had frightened her, on a level she didn't know she was capable of reaching. But it was a simple fear, and right now that simplicity made it far more preferable to the vortex of confusion and deep-settled horror that came with...other things in her life at the time...
Behind her, Carth's silence unnerved her. Normally, he was offering comments on their location, their situation, or even humming, whistling even... Even when he was verbally silent, she could feel his eyes roaming everywhere, could feel his alertness and his innate curiosity for these new places. But now, she heard and felt nothing. Nothing at all. She'd long suspected Carth might be Force Sensitive- just barely, but enough to give them that extra edge they seemed to have when working together in battle and on missions. Could he be unconsciously tapping into that Sensitivity to block her out? It sickened her to know that he had every reason to do just that, whether he knew he was doing it or not.
Determinedly, Revan turned her thoughts away from her unnervingly silent companion, and returned to running sensitive fingers over the etchings on the tomb door. The floor-to-ceiling pile of rubble behind them had proven to be impenetrable, even with her perfectly fine brilliant cyan lightsaber and it's matching damanged crimson twin. So now, this seemingly immovable door was their best chance of escaping from the ten-by-ten space they were trapped in.
"Find anything?" she asked tentatively, over her shoulder. Her gaze never left the sinister-looking runes her fingers were tracing.
A brief silence, and then a cold, "No," was her response. Her innards twisted, and she grit her teeth. "You?" He asked.
"No, nothing," she sighed, dropping her hands from the cold stone and stepping back. She rubbed a sheen of sweat from her brow, smearing dust across her skin in the process and not really caring. It was dark in the chamber, the only light eminating from her two sabers shoved into piles of dirt and left ignited. The sharp hum of her familiar metallic companions was a salve to the ringing that would have otherwise plagued her ears. It was a poor substitute for the long talk she'd like to be having with Carth Onasi, but it would have to do...since the aforementioned pilot seemed rather adverse to even looking at her.
Not that she blamed him.
Since the Leviathan...
She sighed. Since the Leviathan, everything had been different, including herself.
"I had another dream last night," she said out of the silence. Behind her, she felt Carth give a slight start, heard the shift of gravel underfoot as he half turned to look at her. Hunching her shoulders and blinking back unexoplainable moisture in her eyes, Revan -No, Kalora, she told herself determinedly- returned to scrutinizing the runes on the door. They seemed familiar. Maybe at one point she'd been able to read them...
"What about?" He asked, and she closed her eyes, wishing she'd said nothing at all.
"About how at thirteen I had my hair genetically altered to not be blonde," she snipped, falsely jovial sarcasm tinting her tone. She glanced over her shoulder, and wished she hadn't. Carth was glowering at her. She swallowed harshly- any time she'd ever been flippant with Bastila, she'd spied him suppressing a grin, biting his knuckles to keep in his laughter, turning so their resident Jedi Princess couldn't see the amusement in his eyes. Not now.
"It was Makure," she said softly.
"The trading outpost?" Carth's voice was coldly tense. She nodded, closing her eyes and leaning her dirty forehead against the stone door. Stupid door... Why wouldn't it open? And her stupid mouth...why couldn't it have stayed closed?
"Yeah," she said in addition to her nod. She renewed her examination of the door with doubled vigor. Or maybe triple- whatever the exponential, it was enough that she didn't sense or hear Carth coming up behind her, and when a firm hand on her arm pulled her up from where she'd knelt to poke a knot in the stone, turning her around to face him, she gave a thorough start. Rather than apologize for startling her, though, his other hand gripped her other arm.
"What about Makure?" He asked, not unkind, but certainly not any less icy than it'd been since... She looked away from him, steeling both her body and her emotions. She twisted her arms from his grip, slipping to the side and walking to where her lightsabers jutted up from the soft, overturned earth.
"Just flashes," she said. "Not much else. Emotions, scenes...a few phrases here and there. I didn't recognize any voices." She disengaged her blue saber and pulled it from it's dirty holdings. "Not even my own," she added softly, not meeting Carth's gaze when she walked past him, re-igniting her blade and bringing its light closer to that knot near the floor, kneeling down as she did so. Carth knelt beside her, apparently not letting her off with her vague explanation.
"Why did you bother mentioning it, then?"
"On the Hawk," she answered without preamble; she might as well get it out. "You said you all had no way of knowing what would happen if my memories ever resurfaced, if Revan re-emerged. I know...I know I protested that nothing would change, even if I did regain my memories. I'm Kalora Haeth, now. I'm Kalora Haeth, now...Kalora, Kalora, Kalora." She grit her teeth, forcing herself to halt her own repetition. Sighing heavily, she finished, "I thought you'd like to know, is all. I thought...if I keep you informed of anything that does resurface..."
"You think I'll trust you, if I think you're telling me everything." Was that contempt in his voice? It wouldn't surprise her.
"No, I don't expect you to trust me. In fact, I don't want you to," she said, surprising him enough to look at her fully for the first time in days.
"Why is that?" He pressed. "Once upon a time on a little planet named Taris, you wouldn't stop badgering me about why I couldn't trust you. As I recall, you told me you'd earn my trust if it was the last thing you did."
"Don't make me say 'things are different now,''" she scowled at him. "You know how I hate cliches." She moved her fingers away from the stone knot at last, nodding to herself. That knot was definately attached to the stone artificially. She looked around for something strong, but flat...
"All right, so what's changed, aside from the obvious?" He drawled, liquid ice dripping from his voice. Rev- iKalora/i fought the urge to deliver an equally drippy retort.
"I still don't think that I'll return to being the Dark Lord if my memories resurface," she told him, still searching the uneven ground. "But...well, you know me, I like to cover all my angles."
"So did Darth Revan."
"So that's why I'm telling you about my dreams and any visions I get that could be memories," she further explained, ignoring the acid his jab delivered to her heart. She turned and looked at him for a brief moment, adding potency to what she was about to ask. "I want you to watch me, Carth. Watch me closely. Examine my dreams as I tell them to you. Don't let Revan come back, Carth. Don't let me, don't let Kalora die. She- iI/i want Revan to stay dead as bad as I'm sure Revan would like to take my place."
He held her gaze for a long, hard moment before saying, "You realize what you're asking me, don't you? If Darth Revan does ever come back, not just Revan, but Darth Revan... You realize what I'll do. What you're asking me to do..."
"Of course I know," she bit, looking away, inexplicably stung by the lack of emotion in his voice when he'd asked for her clarification. Of course she knew she was effectively asking him to kill her if he ever thought she was returning to her old self...of course she knew...
The last thing she expected was the gentle hand that came from her right, the palm of that hand slipping up her left cheek, fingertips brushing her hairline, thumb resting at the corner of her mouth as that hand softly turned her face to the right, to look at him. There was a barely discernable wry grin hovering at the left corner of his mouth. Barely there...barely there... But it was there.
"I've said it before," he said quietly. "And I'll say it again. You're braver than me."
"'I,'" she said, resorting to her inner smartass in the absence of a genuine response. "It's 'Braver than I' not 'braver than me.'"
To Kalora's neverending surprise, Carth began to laugh. He twisted to the side, falling out of his crouch into a sitting position with his back to the stone door, knees propped up with his forearms resting on those knees, head tilted back and wide mouth letting loose a long, deep bout of laughter.
"If I'd known all it would take to get you to smile again was to give you permission to kill me, I'd have told you a lot sooner," she drawled at him, not quite sure whether or not to be amused along with him -whatever it was he was amused at- or confused...or hurt... But she'd been the last two for long enough, so she let herself smile a bit as Carth's laughter slowed at her words, as he looked at her with those twin whisps of hair falling over one hazel eye.
"Revan," he said. "Not you. You gave me permission to kill Revan, not you."
She sucked in a breath, and blinked back sudden stinging moisture at the corners of her eyes. She didn't blink quite fast enough- the moisture gathered, and fell from the corner of her eye, dripping free of wet lashes to roll down her dirtied face. A fingertip halted it's fall down over her cheek, sweeping it away at the same time the rest of Carth's hand slid up the side of her face. Her hand went over his, even as she bowed her head against his seeing any more escaped tears.
"There was another dream," she said. Thankful for his silence, she continued. "The night after...after the Leviathan. Just a short one. But...he was in it, Carth. Before we went over... He was laughing. He was handsome, then." Wryness entered her voice as she added, "Really handsome. I think... I think part of me was in love with him at one point, before we went to the Dark Side and love became a thing of weakness." Sometime during their exchanges, she'd also moved out of her crouch, switching off her lighsaber as she turned to sit with her back against the door, her left arm pressed up against Carth's right shoulder and side. "We really were best friends..." her voice held a tinge of awe. "I always thought...even when we were in the Light, how could I have been friends with that creature?"
"For once, I can understand that," Carth spoke, somewhat unexpectedly. She'd become so used to his newfound silence over the past couple of days. Now that he was seemingly breaking that vow of silence, she wasn't sure if she was glad...or afraid. What would he say, now that he could bring himself to talking to her again? On top of what she was bashing herself with, she wasn't sure she could take it...
"Karath, remember?" Carth nudged her with an elbow at her silence. "My one-time mentor? Malak's former right hand Admiral? Yeah, I know what you mean. I thought that, once too- how could Saul Karath, my hero, defender of the Republic, follow trash like Malak?"
After a pause, Kalora gave a whisper of an echo of his words, "Yeah... How could Malak...my friend, Jedi of the Order, follow trash like Revan...?"
"We never really know where people's true allegiances lay until they're offered the chance to switch sides," Carth told her blithely, his arm moving up off his knee to wind behind and around her shoulders, pulling her against his side. Not quite understanding what they were doing, and not really wanting to, Kalora let her head fall against his shoulder, staring blanking ahead at the ground.
"Carth, I've got to ask you something," she spoke into the darkness.
"Hm?" He responded, somewhat tense, not quite sure what to expect.
Keeping very still, looking down at the ground and nothing else, Kalora asked simply, "What would have happened with us if...if we'd never found out?"
Further clarification wasn't needed. Carth sighed a bit, looking out ahead of him for a long moment before answering with more honestly than she'd expected. "I would have gotten over my revenge, gotten over Dustil," he told her, his fingers on her shoulder making slow circles on her skin through the fabric of her tunic. "I would have moved on, I would have waited until the war effort wasn't completely consuming us and all our time and efforts," he turned his face to look down at her. Until they locked gazes, she hadn't realized she'd looked away from the ground. "Then I would have asked you to marry me."
"And now?" She asked, tense. Her voice sounded strained, and there she was blinking rapidly, again. Damn that suspicious moisture...damn how she couldn't blink fast enough...
His other hand came up to her face, bringing him around to face her more fully as that hand wiped away one tear, then another, his hand on her shoulder moving to the back of her neck. "Now," he told her with a soft, almost sad smile. "Now I just have a few other things to get over, first."
Then he kissed her, his eyes flicking from her own orbs to her lips before visibly making a decision and moving in to capture her mouth with his in one smooth, completely unexpected move. She drew in a sharp breath, wanting to take this little bit of solace he was offering, wanting it so badly...but afraid. So afraid. Afraid of the passion that suddenly flared in the pit of her belly, afraid of the what ifs? Hesitating in a way that was completely foreign to herself, both her old and new self, she moved her arms between them, one hand resting on that familiar pilot's jacket, the other hand going to the side of his neck.
Despite the stubble on his jaw, the exchange was thoroughly gentle. He was softer than she'd expected, utterly tender with her as his fingers dived into her loosed hair, twisting the strands through his fingers and massaging her scalp, elliciting a delicate sigh of contentment from her. She felt him smile into the slow kiss, and found herself grinning a bit, too. He pulled away, for the slightest of moments, pressing his forehead to hers and smoothing hair from her face. Then they met again, this time at tilted angles, drinking in as much of each other as they could manage. Her arms were all the way around him, now, and she was half craddled in his lap, his right leg beneath her knees, her back propped against his bent left knee with his arms around her and hers around him. The kiss melted into a series of slower, lighter exchanges, each different than the last.
A vibration rumbled through them, and they broke apart alltogether, looking sharply towards the source. Kalora realized for the first time just how fast her heart was racing, how hard it was thumping...or was that Carth's heart against hers that she felt? She couldn't quite tell, and didn't really care to, seeing as her attention was thoroughly occupied by trying to decide if that dust-covered arm reaching through the top of the rubble at the blocked entrance was friend or foe...
Then a blue head, followed by two blue lekku, emerged into the dim light of their prison, and Mission flashed them a welcome smile.
"Hi guys!" the tw'lek chirped, then spotted their position. "Hey, whatcha two doin'?"
"We'll explain when you're older," Carth wisely adverted the question, knowing the jab to the teen's age would distract her from persuing the inquiry. While the teen twi'lek sputtered hotly, Kalora slipped from Carth's grasp, standing on her own then turning to offer Carth a hand up. Was it her imagination, or did he squeeze her hand, gently, before letting go?
Muttering indignities, Mission wiggled back out of the hole, leaving a stream of dim light to flood the little cavern. Looking up at it and knowing it wouldn't take long to widen it to accomodate them, being larger than Mission, they silently decided to set to getting free for now, and address everything else later.
Later. Always later, she thought, pulling down one rock after another. But at least this time she had a little solace to carry her through to that 'later.' Just a little..
End.
First off, no, I don't plan on doing a Carth/Revan snippit series, at least not now. I just finally finished the first game (I know, I'm lame), and had to write isomething/i. I'm not liking it much for my first Carth/Revan romance, but...oh well. The kissing scene is deliberately mild- given the circumstances -physical and mental- I don't think these two level-headed people would go at it like bunnies just right now. As for Carth's hint at marriage, anyone who disagrees with it, well...c'mon, you're telling me a guy who waits around for a couple years while his hunny goes off into the lovely Outter Rim, a guy who's obviously family oriented given what little we knew of his wife and son, wouldn't consider it? Thought so.
Anyways, hope ye all enjoyed... Oh, and check out NaNoWriMo dot Com. I'm participating, under the same penname as here. Check it out!
-Amber Penglass