In the Crusader’s laboratory, the Healer’s daughter had stolen a split-second glance down at her left hand and forearm still clasped in the armored man’s. Triaging it didn't take long. Kaini’s twisting had done a number on the wrist, but somehow she’d shifted most of the pressure into her lower arm. Two nasty little fractures twisted laterally into the thin long bones between her wrist and elbow; radius and ulna. The Jedi woman had half-heartedly hoped to just repair the damage herself before having to admit it to Erril… But her heart sank at the split bone displacement and lack of minerals in her body, and Ashlin ruefully abandoned that idea. Alright, then. She dedicated another second to briefly accepting that the pain of it was bound to spike when the adrenaline wore off, or if her manic ex-Jedi companion had an eruption and jarred it before she extricated herself. But it was nothing she wasn't perfectly capable of managing now: a six, maybe a seven.
She’d aim to deal with that soon enough then, but the brief moment was all the self-inspection she had time for now. Ashlin focused back on Kaini in her mind's eye... or Julian. Ashlin supposed that she should start thinking of the man with his true name.
* * *
The Darksider in front of her was shattered to pieces. It was exactly what she’d been trying to accomplish in the end, more or less. In front of her senses, she watched the armored man—
Julian—turn his back and keep shaking with mind pain and his demons. Ashlin knew that he’d been well on track to being knighted a Guardian years ago. She hadn’t really known him, but she could remember the rough sketch of his life well enough. He’d been her sister’s friend. A fighter, like Nomi.
Now he was wrenching off the helmet and slamming it to the floor. The action itself gave her hope for him, but his frantic desperation made Ashlin conceal a shudder from the calm she was letting him sense of her. She was afraid of him. And she was so, wildly,
angry at him. Fear and anger led to hate, sometimes... But sometimes they didn't. The first two were emotions.
('Emotion, yet Peace'.) The third was a choice; just like the rest of her actions. The healer and empath in her knew that projecting any of her negativity at the Darksider would never have let her accomplish anything, but Ashlin reminded herself that she'd looked for Kaini in the first place because she'd
chosen not to hate him. Or because she was trying, anyway.
(Fake it till you make it, 'Nana.) Julian shivered in more pain. The shaking man was ripping off the gloves, now turning to face her. The physical details didn’t really matter in the projection, but she knew it was accurate enough. Pinkish skin and scars. Purple eyes.
He was exhausted beyond thought.
"What did they do to me?" Julian asked.
Ashlin knew she was more fixed on that question that even he was anymore. She'd half-considered answering one of the half-Zeltron's other questions about himself, or saying anything about all the damage he felt he could still cause.
But she didn’t. Because the man she’d been fighting with for what felt like hours tonight was destroyed with his memory wide open, and Ashlin Faithe couldn’t leave it alone.
The telepath Jedi looked over the exhausted man’s mind again and found a starting point. She didn’t bother warning him or asking for permission; he was so cracked and preoccupied that she wasn’t even sure he could feel much of it. Ashlin flipped the chapters back past Johnathon breaking his ribs tonight, or the gloating about Mission, the constant threats and preying on her since she’d woken up drowning and locked to the table in this lab, all the anger at Erril, and even more at some other male that wasn’t Erril. The exhausted man in her mind's infirmary met her eyes and asked her to kill him. Ashlin slammed back through years of sickening blackness that she'd never have time to decipher, and looked for his shatterpoint. She found it.
Julian wrote:
As if it couldn't possibly get any worse, pain coursed through his body again, while lights shined in his eyes. The pain was worse than before, beyond his limits, he would surely die here, he could go into cardiac arrest and... A droid injected him with something straight into his left arm and his eyes shot open again just as he was on the verge of blacking out. It must have been a pain killer, enough to keep him struggling...
Ashlin's jaw clenched in reality when she ground a single moment from
Julian to a halt, and she knew her projection was rattled. She would have answered him when he asked so sincerely about Nomi... The Jedi woman might have even let a glimpse of how worried she, too, was about her sister and the others. Something must have gone terribly wrong, or else she and Erril would never have woken up captive on this ship in the first place...
But instead Ashlin was frozen perfectly still in her mind's infirmary. In the laboratory, she made herself take a slow breathe and set her other hand on the armored Sith’s shoulder. He was shuddering. In their minds, she stared at the half-Zeltron’s exhausted purple eyes, and spoke barely audibly.
“Shhh... Julian. Stop. Please.... Just. Hold still for a minute.”
Julian wrote:
One Week. Moments. Endless Days. Hours. Later.
He was still strapped to the same table. His muscle tone was beginning to diminish as they atrophied over time. He had lost his sense of dignity and his sense of self...been without......for over a week.....Not something that in and of itself was embarrassing... especially to a Jedi... But.....
------Tubes to his arms------feeding nutrients and liquids---If he could get the restraints off-------meant ripping the----Eventually this all-------either going to die in this next------his captors would stop-------The pain of his breaths--intense that------still no closer to understanding why---Even if----told him, he would have-------Everything in his life was-----Profound sense of loss---was blank---did not understand what it was for----current situation----First the electricity or some variant of it-----more severe---fingernails had----Or else----Then there------The burns were the worst of it-----red hot------lowered onto various---searing and sizzling----The smell was----could only endure this for--- to shock----could not remember---paired this with the electricity---would pass out--few seconds--the lights...
—Flesh was—disaster zone—the scarred—sort of—bacteria—soon—death would—Beginning to long for—more appealing than—electricity—dreaming of—electricity—he passed out—lusted—death—pain—electricity—through—body—extant—again—faded—again—he—electricity—again—he—
—hated—he—
—electricity—
Again.
.........
"Julian."
Ashlin's heart broke.
She'd known it would have been ugly. There was no wrecking even a half-decent man without ugliness. Pain had always been a familiar theme in her life; just as much as healing was. The Order that trained her on such things nearly from infancy... They tried to for all the children. In her case, her mother had made certain.
This is an apple.
This is the Ashla.
This is Keena. Listen to her.
We are Jedi.
We're not perfect, but we choose to do Good.
Others try to take that from us.
They will break us if they can.
That was agony.
It's a dire time.
But it's always a dire time.
Emotion, but always Peace.
Breathe.
I'm sorry that I didn't give you a birthday. I wish I had done that better.
Thank you for forgiving me.
Ashlin knew she'd been born in a nightmare; but then unbelievable grace had carried her through it and let her leave that hell again as a tiny infant, before she formed a single black memory of her own. Her brand of Sensitivity meant she'd collected or been given worlds full of imagery and foreign memories... some beautiful, some terrible, some lies... But she had been Jedi for every single day of her living memory, and not one drop of that life had ever been stolen from her.
She looked back over her scant memories of her sister's childhood friend in the Temple... Ashlin could tell she was forgetting something... She couldn't remember if he'd been a childling initiate, or if he'd been born there. But it didn't really matter right now.
Julian and Nomi were very young children when they'd met. Whether he'd been born into her people or not, the half-Zeltron Jedi been raised and trained in the Order for his entire childhood that mattered. Up until he was a man, as best as Ashlin could tell from him now. He was good. He'd have known all the rules. He'd have been a Guardian, like Nomi. Brash. But strong. He'd done everything right, as much as it mattered, or as much as any of them could have.
And Johnathon stole him. And stripped him. He'd burned out every part of him with worse agony than anything sentient is built to tolerate; while he chemicaled and machined his body to survive through it.
Who would do that?? The amount of effort was preposterous; and there was so precious little to be gained. Even it hadn't been Johnathon himself... Johnathon was enough of a Seer. He knew. And, then... What? Johnathon had stolen Julian. He melted his mind open, patched him with lies, then locked it with a memory-loop reminding him of pain that shouldn't even exist. And then Johnathon had kept him.
Ashlin felt sick thinking about it. She also knew that she was taking too long now. Julian was still shaking in pain and exhaustion, and Ashlin was afraid—almost terrified now— of losing hold of Julian enough for the abomination of hate and false memories to snap back into place; or for Julian to crack again under the mind block again, for Johnathon to wake up and inevitably notice that she'd meddled. What time was it? Not long had physically passed as far as the lab was concerned. Ashlin knew it must still be hours until morning by ship's time, but who knew what that really meant? She didn't. Maybe Julian did, she supposed.
The Jedi woman breathed in. Ashlin sat down on the floor of the infirmary in her mind's eye, and patted for the exhausted man to come sit next to her. She couldn't be angry at him anymore.
"Julian... Sit down before one of us loses hold of this thing... And let me try to help with that for a minute. I can't fix it right now, but maybe if I can get a look at it.. It's not your fault. They pushed you past an eleven... so many times... And I think you're much stronger than I am."
After a small pause, she added.
"I forgive you."
