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'You're aware, of course,' Marokhai says, hovering in the doorway, 'that the moment you touch down on Korriban, they will try to kill you.'Saovani blinks at him. Then grins. 'If you worry like this when I’m just being sent for preliminary training, I dread to think how you’ll react when I reach my final trials.’Her brother sighs, and his distress floods out through the Force to tug at Saovani's gut. It's a strange feeling, but Force bonds are always strange, and this one-way bond she shares with Marokhai is no exception. He's an unlocked datapad to her: nothing happens inside him that she can’t read, just by opening the bond and walking into his mind. Even after a year in the Imperial military has taught him to cover his emotions under a layer of eerie impassivity, she knows him, knows what’s happening in his mind and heart through whispers in the Force. Right now, for example, he’s putting up a very good impersonation of a Zabrak-shaped statue - but the roar of worry in the Force between them is almost deafening.‘I wish you'd take this more seriously,' he says. 'The other acolytes will know that they need to eliminate the competition to survive. They need you dead, and you can't let that happen.'It's a blunt thing to say to a sixteen-year-old, but Saovani knows he's just trying to prepare her. To protect her. That’s always been his first instinct, even though she’s the one who sends tremors through the Force just by entering a room, while he will never be able to levitate so much as a pebble. Even though she's taller and faster at sixteen than he is at nineteen. Even though he’s the one that their mother ignores, the one she snarls at and, on the worst occasions, Force-flings across rooms, while Saovani has never wanted for anything. Saovani turns away, so Marokhai won’t see her bite her lip. He didn’t ask to be born Force-blind any more than Saovani asked to be born Force-sensitive, but their mother seems distinctly unconcerned by that. Sometimes she wonders why he doesn't resent her.‘I’m aware that attempts on one’s life are an occupational hazard of being Sith.’ She Force-pulls a pile of clothes from a cupboard and floats it into her bag. ‘I won't be letting my guard down. I’m rather intelligent, you know.’His mouth twitches. ‘There’s room for two opinions on that,’ he says, and Saovani throws a shirt at him.A few moments pass in silence, except for the sound of fabric rustling as she rearranges her packing. Then Marokhai sighs, and leans against the doorframe. ‘I know you’ll be careful. But – be careful.’Saovani hesitates, hand outstretched for her datapad. Then she snatches it up and rolls her eyes. ‘You worry too much.’Three hours later, her shuttle to Korriban sputters and stalls mid-flight, engines burned out by well-aimed shots. The raiders burst in, faces obscured behind helmets and masks. Saovani lashes out in the Force, blindly, madly, kills for the first time, then kills again, and tries to kill again –And then they get the slave collar around her neck.For the first month, Marokhai’s grief screams inside her. An extra layer of agony, laid thick upon her own.Then it numbs. At first, the sudden distance from his feelings terrifies her. Is he forgetting her? Someone must have found the shuttle floating burned-out and deserted, and they would have reported it to her family. Mother, Marokhai - they must think she's dead. And he can’t have moved on from mourning her so soon, how dare he stop mourning –Then she realises. Her bond with him was so powerful, so constant, because she knew him completely. But grief changes you, and whoever her brother is becoming, light-years away and aching for the loss of his sister… she doesn’t know that man any more.But though the bond is weaker, it's still there,For the first few weeks after the slavers take her, she tries to escape almost every day. Then writhing on the floor in the grip of the shock collar loses its novelty. They’ve found how to make her fear of the collar outweigh her hunger for freedom, and she forgets how long it’s been since her last attempt. She stops spending her days searching for openings, and spends them with her eyes downturned, her breathing unsteady in her throat. And at night, she abandons her own emotions, and digs as far into Marokhai’s as she can.She only gets faint impressions now. He’s in danger, he’s relaxed, he’s unhappy, he’s safe – but he’s free, and that’s enough to make him her refuge. She can focus on his presence until she can almost hear his voice and see his face, until she no longer feels like she is utterly, mercilessly alone.Saovani understands now why Marokhai never resented her. Their mother never forgave him for being Force-blind. Aliens in the Empire are nothing unless we carve out our place with lightsaber and lightning, she used to say, but Marokhai would never be able to do that. So their mother hated him, crushed him a little more every day, gave all her attention to Saovani. And that left Marokhai with a choice. Envy his Force-sensitive sister, hate her, and be alone. Or love her, even though she didn’t deserve it, and be loved in return. Have someone in his life who'd care for him.The idea of hating him is tempting. Where is he now, the brother who always seemed so determined to protect her? Why hasn’t he come for her? And all the logical reasons – he doesn’t know I’m alive, he could never find out where I am, he’d die if he fought my master – aren’t enough to stop a scream from surging up inside her chest.She wrestles it into silence. If she hates him, he won’t be a refuge any more. And she needs this bond with him. If it snaps, she’s adrift, she’s alone, she’s unloved, she’ll forget that she was ever free and that she could be free again –No. She will not allow that. She cannot.So she hates her master instead, hates him with everything she has as five years shuffle by. Chants the Sith Code every night. The Force shall free me, she tells herself again and again, and finally – in a blaze of lightning that erupts from her fingertips and scorches the life from her master’s flesh – it does.A week later, Marokhai knocks on her door the same way he always did. Two quick raps, then two more, slower.Saovani closes her eyes. She sensed him coming. She pinpointed through the Force the exact moment his ship touched down on Dromund Kaas, and she felt him growing closer and closer to the home they grew up in. But the battered ribbon of Force that ties them together tells her only that he is there, nothing more. When she answers his knock, she will look at her brother, and for the first time in her life, she won’t know what he’s thinking.She isn’t ready. But she lifts her hand, reaches out with the Force, and pulls the door open.And he – he’s there, standing in the doorway, like he was five years ago as she packed her bags for Korriban. She remembers the colour of his eyes now, amber-ish brown, and the shape of his face, and the pattern of his horns. The tattoos are new. Mother never let him get the traditional tattoos when he came of age, he must have got them himself in the years she’s been gone. And he hasn’t grown, has he? He hasn’t grown an inch since she last saw him, he always was minuscule and he’s looking right at her and his lips are slightly parted and she can’t read his face and she can't read his feelings, it's like he's completely empty and she doesn’t know what he’s thinking –Saovani closes her eyes. Breathes in. Opens them. Manages a smile.‘You got your tattoos at last,’ she says.He swallows, and takes a step into the room. ‘Saovani.’Everything inside her clenches into a knot. His voice is familiar and yet it’s the voice of a stranger, and she wants to let him hold her and whisper gentle things to her like he would when they were children, and at the same time she wants to run and run and run.Marokhai takes another step towards her. He smiles at her, breathlessly, and opens his arms –
No –
No, no one touches me, not even you –
She flinches back and draws her arms across her chest, because touch means pain, it means pain and control and she will never let anyone touch her again.Silence. The room is completely still.Then Marokhai dips his head and holds up his hands a little, and Saovani doesn’t need to listen to the bond to know that he’s sorry. Her breathing falls back into a steady rhythm, and she lowers her arms.‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ she gets out. ‘I just – I can’t.’‘Of course,’ he says quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I understand. I mean, of course I don’t understand, but I – I can see why you wouldn’t be comfortable with –’He stops, swallows, and looks down. Saovani remembers, dimly, that this stumbling over his sentences is unlike him, that Marokhai either had his words perfectly formulated in his head before he spoke or he didn’t speak at all. ‘I spent the entire shuttle ride here trying to work out what I’d say,’ he says at last. ‘Nothing I came up with is...’ He looks up, and when she avoids his eyes, he shifts his gaze to the wall behind her. He’s trying to give her space. To protect her. Some things never change.‘When our mother contacted me to tell me you were home, she said you’d freed yourself from slavery. That’s all I know, and you don’t have to tell me anything more. If you never want to speak about it, I’ll never ask. Anything you do want to tell me, I’ll listen to. And... I want you to know that I’ve missed you.’He’s telling the truth. She knows, because she feels it. A jolt in the bond between them, a split-second in which she feels everything he’s feeling. Guilt. Longing. Uncertainty.‘I’ve spent every second I could over the last five years trying to find you. I left the military. Joined Imperial Intelligence. I knew they were my best chance of finding out what happened to you. It took me a year to reach a high enough clearance level to find out that they suspected kidnapping, and then I realised I’d need Cipher-level authority to learn who was behind it, and I… I promised myself I’d do whatever it took. I'd fight up the ranks until I knew enough to find you.’He drops his eyes to the floor. ‘I know that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t undo anything that’s happened. I’m sorry. If you’re angry, then be as angry as you need to be. I don’t know if you want me to be part of your life again – as your brother, as your friend, as anything. But if you do want me to be here, I’ll…’ He stops. Bites his lip. ‘I’ll try.’She will not cry. She will not. She will not cry simply because she’s forgotten what it’s like to have anyone let you make the rules. To have anyone not assume that she will fall in line with their whims. So she keeps her face blank, chokes back the feelings she can’t put names to, and manages to say, ‘Thank you.’It’s all she can say. She can’t tell him that a part of her is angry, a part of her wants so very badly to hate him for not finding her sooner, for never storming in with vibroblades at the ready to knife down her master and bring her home. But she also can’t find the words to say that she is grateful. So, so grateful that he’s letting her draw the boundaries. That he’s here for her.Does he realise how hard this will be? How little is left of the sister he knew? What if she lets him try, and they find out they despise the people they’ve become? She doesn’t know if she can bear that, after everything -A rustling noise jolts her out of her thoughts. Marokhai is pulling something from his pocket: a square box, small enough to fit in his palm. He moves as if to hold it out to her, then catches himself, and sets it down on the table next to her instead.‘I got you this,’ he says. ‘You should have a homecoming present.’A present. A thing given to her, something she gets to keep and own. It takes a moment to refamiliarize herself with the concept.The box contains a few silver rings, linked by delicate chains and engraved discs. It’s jewellery, she realises, a horn decoration. She always used to love these, loved the shining metal and the feeling that she wasn’t hiding anything about the fact that she was a Zabrak, that she was drawing attention to her horns despite the disapproval of the humans around her. She loved how bold and important it made her feel.And she still does. It’s beautiful. The first beautiful thing she’s seen in years.Suddenly, it feels easier to speak. She presses her fingertips against the jewellery, as if she can draw strength from it somehow, and says, ‘Khai. You have to understand that I won’t be the sister you remember. I’m not the same person you saw off to Korriban when you were nineteen.’He dips his head, very slowly. ‘No. But… the sister I had at nineteen was a different sister to the one I had at nine, too. I know it’s not the same – I know I can’t imagine what you’ve been through since you were taken – but you can’t care about someone without accepting that they’ll change.’You’ve not changed much, Saovani thinks, and smiles.‘Well,’ she says. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’The bond between them blazes with relief and delight, and for once, the emotions she’s sensing are clear on her brother’s face.Saovani reaches up and slips the metal rings over her horns, so that they sit cool and comfortable against her forehead. She doesn’t know when she’ll be ready to talk about what happened. Maybe an hour, maybe a year, maybe never. And maybe this won’t work. Maybe she and Marokhai lost each other years ago when she was pulled screaming from her shuttle, and all the work they can throw into being each other’s siblings again will be wasted. Maybe love simply isn’t enough.But at the very least, love is a start. And Saovani has a good feeling about this.