Age: Still 15

All of Ania’s lessons had been temporarily postponed, so she had plenty of time the next day to gather information on her quarry from the other apprentices. Six years old, arrived a little over a month ago, didn’t like bantha milk... by the time evening came, she thought she had a fair idea of where to start with the little girl.

As soon as Bastila retreated to her corner, which was almost as soon as she entered the room, Ania went over and sat down next to her. Bastila spared her a single glance, then apparently decided to ignore her; she drew her knees up to her chest and buried her face in them. Ania, not to be deterred, started talking to her anyway.

"You missed the demonstration last night. Don’t you want to know how to blow stuff up?"

Silence.

"Bastila?"

"No," Bastila said in a muffled, sulky voice.

"Okay, how about flying? I bet you’d like to fly."

"No." But this ‘no’ was much less convinced than the previous one. Ania pressed on.

"Not even a little bit? You can see all sorts of stuff from up there, you know."

"I don’t want to," Bastila said. She still didn’t sound convinced, but Ania clearly wasn’t going to get anywhere fast on this topic, so she changed tack.

"All right. What do you want to do?"

"Go home."

Damn. Of course the kid would say that, wouldn’t she. Ania sighed; this was clearly going to be an uphill battle. "I’m afraid you can’t go home, Bastila."

"Why not?"

"Because the Jedi don’t want you to develop attachments," Ania said. "And that’s sort of the reason I’m here, too."

She let the conversation lapse, and was soon rewarded; Bastila lifted her head and looked over at her in childish incredulity. "You got sent back down because you wanted to talk to your parents?"

The notion of actually wanting to contact her parents caught Ania enough by surprise that she was still trying to suppress her amusement when Bastila finally said the line. "No, because I..." Oh, hell, how did you explain this to a six-year-old? "I make friends too easily, I suppose. My parents abandoned me years ago."

"Did they like you?"

That question, too, caught her off-guard. She had always assumed that they, like a few other people she’d met, had had adverse reactions to her and, rather than adoring her, had ended up hating the sight of her. But Kavar had told her quite clearly that he was letting her go because he liked her too much, hadn’t he? So maybe...

"I didn’t used to think so. I’m not so sure now."

"My mother dun’t like me," Bastila informed her. "S’why she sent me here."

At last, they were back in familiar territory. Though Bastila wasn’t quite as articulate as Malak, the argument was basically the same; unfortunately, neither Ania nor Revan had yet been able to come up with a suitable answer to it. The closest that either of them had got was Ania smacking Malak on the head and telling him that at least his parents had found a good home for him before abandoning him. She certainly wasn’t going to hit a girl nine years younger than herself, though.

"You know," she ventured, "everyone feels the same. Almost no-one’s here by choice."

Bastila seemed to perk up a little at the notion that everyone else was as miserable as she was. "Really?"

"‘Course. You can’t just sit here and mope, though, because they’re not going to send you home. They’re stubborn like that."

"But I hate it here! Nobody likes me, and -"

"Because you’ve been screaming at everyone who came near," Ania told her, and looked around for a suitable candidate to prove this; she soon found him, bent over an exercise book with an expression of concerted effort on his face. "Hey, Mical?"

He looked up, and his face split into a wide grin when he saw who it was. "Yes?"

"Do you mind looking after Bastila for a while? She won’t hurt you, I promise, she’s just lonely."

He eyed Bastila warily for a moment; Bastila gave a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile, but for some reason it didn’t deter Mical, who nodded and said, "Okay. How do you spell ‘exploded’?"

Lysia, Malak thought cheerfully as he watched her pad about on the mat with her Master, looked like she was in a foul mood today. It was no wonder, really, if she’d been force-fed whatever Revan had prescribed for her all yesterday afternoon.

He couldn’t help but wonder what Revan had prescribed, actually. Certainly something disgusting, but with Revan’s limited understanding of medicine there was also a slim chance that she had accidentally mixed up a poison - and Malak, of course, would be getting the blame.

No - Lysia would probably be dead or at least seriously ill by now if that was the case, and besides, Revan wasn’t that stupid. Never mind poisoning Lysia, she wouldn’t risk her chance of finding out her father’s identity for anything smaller than a full-scale Mandalorian invasion of the Republic, and maybe not even that.

Malak still wasn’t sure that he understood why she wanted to know who her father was at all, really. He and Revan had discussed it at some length yesterday, and she had given all the usual reasons - following in his footsteps, wanting to know why he left her mother, wanting to know what her surname was - but Malak still couldn’t quite make it past the part where the man had got Revan’s mother pregnant and then left her to die of starvation in an attempt to get her daughter to safety. If he was a Jedi, he clearly wasn’t a particularly good one.

Two Knights finished their bout and stepped off their mat, leaving a space free. Malak stood up to go over, but Zhar put a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Not today, Padawan."

"But we need a mat to train," Malak objected, doing his best to avoid shaking the hand off again. He was not nearly fond enough of Zhar to feel comfortable with even that small amount of physical contact, a feeling which only increased each day that he woke up with a pounding headache and each time that his friends came back with wonderful stories of other planets and great adventures - or even any adventures. In fact, he’d take one of Revan’s boring diplomatic missions where nothing at all went wrong over spending one single day more in the Temple, doing the same routine day after day.

Zhar must have sensed his irritation, because he removed the offending hand before replying. "You’re far too used to me, Malak. I want to try you against a new opponent."

Malak was about to ask who when Lysia finished her bout; her Master said something to her and stepped off the mat, but Lysia stayed put, turning her head as if looking for something.

Oh, Force, no. As Malak trudged up to the mat, he consoled himself with the knowledge that he was, at the very least, guaranteed an exciting half-hour. The only problem was that he wasn’t sure if he would still be alive by the end of it.

"What do you mean, he’s not in the archives?"

"You DNA does not match any other record in our archives, Padawan," Atris repeated patiently. "I cannot say it any more plainly."

"But he was a Jedi," Revan said numbly.

"Do you have any proof of that?" Master Kae asked. "Besides what your mother told you, I mean."

"He had a lightsaber," Revan said.

The three women exchanged glances. Finally, Kreia spoke. "You should know that is by no means conclusive evidence, Revan."

"But -" Revan began, then stopped. If she told them about the holocron, she knew, they would insist on putting it into the archives with the other ones; she certainly wouldn’t be allowed to keep it. She had only kept hold of it for this long by keeping it completely hidden. Even Malak didn’t know it existed.

"He may still have been a Force user, Revan," Master Kae said gently, misinterpreting her hesitation as distress. "I doubt your mother would have told you he was a Jedi if she didn’t believe it herself."

If she didn’t tell them, she would never be able to prove it and they would never let her keep looking. Revan swallowed hard and said, "He left me a holocron. I never handed it in."

There was silence for a moment, then Atris said slowly, "Coupled with a lightsaber... I suppose that would make him a Jedi."

"Or something else," Kae said, so quietly that Revan almost missed it. "May we see it, Padawan?"

Vrook looked livid, Lotli amazed that a Padawan could be so impudent. Voreen was staring; Kavar was bright red with embarrassment and kept trying to apologise for his ex-Padawan’s behaviour. This would probably have been more effective if Ania hadn’t been shouting at him.

She was aware, just, that she had got Dyuun into a good deal of trouble by dragging him along to help her eavesdrop on the Council. The Sullustan had retreated to the doorway and was shaking his head, muttering something that Ania could probably have translated if she had had the slightest inclination to.

"Padawan... Ania..." Kavar pleaded, as she dredged a few more select words from her memory and used them, as loudly as her cracking voice would allow her, "please. Calm down, let the Council explain -"

Explain? How the hell could they explain this? She had trusted him, all those years ago when he had had the common decency to tell her about her own bonding trick - and now he had kept equally important information back from her! Did a Padawan not have the right to know that she was likely to develop full-blown prophetic abilities in the near future? Because of course, having an unexpected and potentially very violent vision in the middle of your - your dinner wouldn’t be at all shocking, would it? It was the fracking menstrual thing, all over again. They never mentioned it, not even once, and then suddenly you were bleeding and you had no idea what was going on and you went to the Council and they were ever-so superior, telling you that they’d known all along, and why didn’t they warn you, then?

Because, after all, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know what it meant. She had done her homework. Sure, some visions were wonderfully mild, but most wouldn’t be. This wasn’t like her fracking hour-ahead precognition, which was just there, running in a part of her mind that, like the bonds, was just naturally there for it. Precog was a part of her - visions wouldn’t be, and she had no idea what to expect. Oh, but the Council had been trying to work it out for her, Master Kavar? Well, that was very nice, but had they ever considered for just a moment that perhaps she would like to be involved in her own life?

She had to stop for breath at this point, and Master Vrook seized the opportunity to say something himself. As soon as he opened his mouth, she knew it couldn’t be good; Vrook hated her, with the awful passion that came of being ‘allergic’ to her bonds.

"As I was saying," he said, glaring at her as though daring her to try to interrupt him, "while she may be too well-trained to avoid the eventual manifestation of prophetic visions, she is not ready to handle them."

"Such language," Master Lotli murmured, clearly aghast.

"High spirits," Kavar muttered. He was white now, Ania noticed with vicious satisfaction. "I assure you, she’s not usually this... this..."

"Independent?" Ania spat.

He winced. "I was going to say irrational."

Because that wasn’t a damning word to use of a fellow Jedi, Ania thought bitterly. Why couldn’t they understand? All she wanted was to be involved. Well, all right, what she really wanted was for the Force to leave her the hell alone and let her live out the rest of her life as an acrobat or something, but that wasn’t likely to happen, and the next best thing would be at least knowing in advance what it would do to her next. It didn’t seem likely to stop, after all; it had found a victim and, like all bullies, clearly wasn’t going to stop until she had gone completely insane from sheer mental stress.

"Atris has already said that she’ll take Ania," Kavar said, appealing now to the rest of the Council.

Vrook snorted. "Then I hope Atris knows what she’s let herself in for. Go straight there, Padawan, and I don’t want to see you for at least a week."

Bruises, as any neophyte apprentice knew, were the spawn of the Dark Side. Everyone got them, plenty of them, and most dished out quite a few as well. Hell, Malak spent most of his time curing bruises, usually because Revan had talked him into it by objecting, not unreasonably, that he had caused them in the first place.

He did, however, flat-out refuse to cure his own bruises. They healed up well enough on their own, and he was sure that healing every minor injury with the Force couldn’t be good for his immune system. Oh, everyone said that you couldn’t get addicted to the Force, but then a commune of addicts would say that, wouldn’t they...

Of course, he didn’t usually have quite so many bruises. Lysia was a devil with a sword, and he had been quite relieved when they had switched to lightsabers; at least with those, the training blades only made your arm go numb for a minute.

He undressed and slid into the ‘fresher. When he emerged, it was to find a certain scarlet-haired girl taking practice swings with his lightsaber, a critical expression on her face.

"Lys - that’s my - this is the boy’s changing room!" he managed at last. She gave him the sort of look which said clearly that yes, she knew that, then shrugged and turned his ’saber off, throwing it to him; as she did so, she took the opportunity to take a long, undisguised look at his - well, his everything, really. Force, did she have no shame at all?

"Just testing it. Not as bad as I thought it must be, which means the problem’s you. Huh."

"I’m naked," Malak said, in case she had gone temporarily blind.

"Yeah, I can see that. I thought you were getting decent marks."

Had she really walked into the wrong changing room just to talk about how soundly she had beaten him? Lysia had never struck Malak as the gloating type.

"I am."

"Against who? The droids?" She sat down on his clean tunic, crossing her legs. "I’m not that good, Malak, and I had you all over that mat. Even Revan took you down last month."

"She cheated," Malak said. It was still a sore point.

Lysia raised one eyebrow. "Uh-huh. Look, I just wanna know why you suck so much. You always seemed decent from a distance, and you’ve definitely got the body for it..." her eyes began to travel down his body again, and Malak was filled with the sudden urge to hide inside the sonic shower.

"I don’t suck," he said. "Revan -"

"Handles a lightsaber like a kid," Lysia snapped. "Face it, Malak, you sucked out there. And I think I know why, too."

He wasn’t going to get rid of her unless he listened, he could tell that much. Malak sighed. "Enlighten me, O Master."

"Say please."

"Oh, for the love of -"

"You’ve never been in a proper fight," Lysia said, before Malak could finish. He gaped at her. "No, really. You’ve never been out on missions, or anything. All you know is what they teach you, and that’s not enough. Revan didn’t cheat, she used a tactic she’d picked up in the field -"

If using the Force to short out his lightsaber then hurling inactive training remotes at his head wasn’t cheating, then Malak didn’t know what was.

"- and so did I, and you’re still fighting by the book. It’s no wonder you’re behind the rest of us, even if you are doing well ‘far as the curriculum’s concerned."

Malak was about to object again when it occurred to him that she might actually have a point. He was still trying to get his mind around the concept of Lysia being right about something when she stood up again and said, "Anyway. I thought you should know. If you ever get any free time, I could give you another fight..."

Oh, Force, she just didn’t stop, did she? "Well, maybe. I’m usually busy, anyway."

"Yeah, but you’re not learning anything useful, and I bet you could beat me if you tried hard enough." She shrugged, and turned to go. "Just a thought. Oh, and Malak?"

"Yes?"

"Nice body."

Malak threw his lightsaber at the door as it closed behind her.

The holocron was a pyramidal thing, small enough to fit in the palm of Revan’s hand as she held it out to her Master and wondered what she had got herself into.

"Oh, my," Atris murmured, trying to see over Kreia’s shoulder; the latter’s nose was almost touching the holocron, and she was breathing all over Revan’s hand. Revan wouldn’t have minded, except that Kreia’s breath was never exactly fresh. "Is it really a -"

Kreia nodded, stepping away at last. "It is Sith, without a doubt. And you have had it for how long, Revan?"

"Since I was three," Revan said. "My mother gave it to me right before she died. It taught me the healing trance, that’s how I survived." It was a tiny lie: the technique wasn’t the same as the Jedi healing trance, as she had discovered when the Masters started teaching the trance in lessons. It worked just as well, though, if not slightly better, so the fact that she had been unable to learn the proper trance hadn’t bothered her. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever been able to tell the difference.

Kreia gave her a sharp look and a brain-poke: Revan replied with a blank, innocent stare and a hastily-erected mental wall, though she knew it was too late.

"A Sith holocron containing a Jedi technique?" Atris asked in surprise, and assumed Kreia’s position, breathing all over the holocron. Revan wished someone would just pick it up; her arm was getting tired.

She was rather surprised at how calmly she was taking this news, really. No doubt it would hit her soon, that her father was not a Jedi at all but something quite different, and then - well, then she would probably feel awful.

"There is no reason why it couldn’t," Kreia said, her eyes still on Revan. "A holocron is only a storage device. As long as the creator knew the technique, he would be able to instil it into the holocron."

"Is that the only thing in the holocron, Revan?" Master Kae asked. Revan, who had been expecting the question, took a couple of moments to fix her blocks more firmly in place before replying.

"Yes. At least, the only part I’ve accessed." Even if Kreia did get in, she didn’t suppose that it mattered. Most of the other information that she had been able to access was mundane. One other equally banal Force technique, reference to a third, and two lists of planets which, as far as Revan could tell, had no connections whatsoever. The only notable thing about them was that Korriban appeared on both.

"Hm. What about the Gatekeeper? The... personality, guarding it."

"I don’t know," Revan lied, her heart beginning to race. Someone was sure to call her on this. "I haven’t accessed it since that trip."

Sure enough, Kreia arched an eyebrow in disbelief. "Not once? You have never been... curious?"

"I know any child of mine would have opened that thing as often as she possibly could," Kae agreed, then - Revan was sure - blushed faintly. "I’m sorry... did I say child? I meant Padawan."

"Well, I don’t really remember how I accessed it," Revan said. "I went straight into the healing trance, and - I don’t think Jedi ones work in quite the same way."

Indeed, Kreia’s voice murmured in her mind, and Revan jumped slightly. No matter how often Kreia did it, she had never quite got used to the suddenness of telepathy. You were able to find the thoughts of one among many with only basic training, yet you could not unlock a simple holocron. Her tone became lighter, more instructive. You must endeavour for greater plausibility, Padawan, particularly if you wish to fool me.

Revan turned to look at Kreia, whose face was impassive, before replying. Sorry, Master. But there really isn’t anything interesting on it that I can tell. The Gatekeeper won’t let me see half of the data, and he’s rather boring himself, too. There was the small matter that he only wouldn’t let her see the rest of data until she ‘came of age’, whenever that was, but Kreia didn’t need to know everything.

Master Kae cleared her throat. "I don’t mean to intrude, but telepathy seems a little rude given the circumstances."

"My apologies," Kreia said, as Revan mumbled her own apology. "It was merely a disciplinary matter."

"It is different," Atris muttered, making Revan jump - she had completely forgotten that Atris was there, still hunched over her hand. "Yet, not too different. Given time, I’m sure I could... how fascinating."

Kae cleared her throat again, a little more firmly this time. "Don’t let it fascinate you too much, Atris. All the same, I feel it would be wise if you and Kreia were to take a closer look at it, just to be sure." She gave Revan a small, apologetic smile, and stretched out her hand. "Will you give it over to the archives now, Padawan?"

Every fibre of Revan’s body rebelled. It was the only thing she had of her father, whoever - whatever - he was. It had kept her alive when she was small, when she knew she should have died. The Gatekeeper was a boring, grandfatherly old man and all it would let her access were two boring lists and a boring mental shielding technique which she still hadn’t perfected, but was sure would be useful. Whatever it was going to allow her to see when she came of age was sure to be equally boring. It had never tried to tempt her to the Dark Side, at least no more than she was tempted every day by the desire to grab Lysia and order her to stay away from Malak. About the most evil thing it had ever done was to give Ania nightmares and nausea back on Dantooine, when they had shared a room and Revan had hidden it too close to Ania’s bed, but how had Revan been supposed to know that Ania would react like that?

"But," she said. Kae’s expression softened.

"I know it’s the only thing you have of them, Padawan, but it is of the Dark Side. There’s no way we can allow you to keep it, I’m afraid."

Revan looked around at the three faces watching her, saw that there was no way that she could win this and, sighing, handed the holocron to Atris.

Ania hovered outside the door to the library, doing her best to look as if she were simply a bored Padawan loitering around rather than an extremely nervous one who had just been hauled up in front of the Council, given a stern ticking-off and sent here. If she did it well enough and loitered long enough, some passing Master might set her an errand in order to get her doing something useful, and she would be able to avoid this altogether.

Atris wasn’t the problem; Ania liked Atris well enough, and could be fairly certain that Atris was fond of her. No, the problem was that she simply didn’t want to have to start off a new stage of training by giving her Master a message saying that she had been found in the air vents, eavesdropping on the Council, and when caught had then spent a good ten minutes swearing at her previous Master for not telling her that she was probably going to develop full-blown Seeing powers at some point in the near future. Ania had taken a look at the note; it contained the word ‘disgraceful’, which was about as strong as Master Lotli’s language got.

To make matters worse, Atris clearly wasn’t alone; Ania could hear voices, and sense Revan through their bond. Force, this was going to be embarrassing.

She loitered for as long as she could, and was only finally driven inside by the appearance of Master Vrook at one end of the corridor.

She found Atris in her office, along with Revan and Master Kreia. The two Masters seemed to be deeply engrossed in the holographic display emitting from the top of a pyramidal object which Ania did not recognise; Revan was sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking extremely bored. At least, she mostly looked bored; as she looked up at Ania, Ania noticed that her bottom lip was bloody, as if she had been biting it in worry for several hours.

"What do you mean, that’s all?" Atris asked suddenly, making Ania jump. The hologram, which had been facing Kreia, spun to face her; it was an old man, so old that he was bent almost double, and when he spoke his voice was almost a wheeze - though still very strong.

"Whut? Speak up, m’dear!"

A sudden surge of smugness came from Revan; Ania, who knew that her friend must have something to do with this or she wouldn’t be here, went to sit down next to her.

"What’s going on?"

"He’s playing with them," Revan murmured. "He’s not deaf. I think Atris might lose her temper if he keeps it up much longer, though. It’s been nearly two hours, and so far the only thing they’ve got him to do is to confirm what I’ve already told them."

"That thing’s yours?"

"Used to be, until two hours ago," Revan said, and turned back to the pantomime on the desk, biting her lip again as she did so.

"Right," Ania said, and tried to think. If Revan knew this much about it, but evidently hadn’t handed it in until somebody found out about it, then she must have had it for a while, which probably meant that it had been her father’s, which explained why she hadn’t handed it in in the first place. She had also probably lied to the Masters, if confirming what she had already said was a good thing.

All of this was fairly obvious, at least to Ania, but it didn’t answer one very basic question.

"Er, Revan? What is it?"

"But you are a holocron," Kreia said, even as Revan turned to answer Ania’s question. "You are capable of storing far more data than that."

"WHUT?"

"SHE SAID -" Atris bellowed.

"Awright, awright, no need ta shout, ‘m not deaf -"

Revan, Ania could tell, was barely suppressing a grin. "It’s a holocron."

"Your father’s?"

"Mm."

"Don’t suppose it tells you who he was, then," Ania said. If it did, Revan wouldn’t have spent nearly so much time fretting over him.

It turned out to be the wrong question; Revan, never easy to read even with five-minute conversational precognition, clammed up entirely. "No."

"Right," Ania said, and they fell into a somewhat awkward silence.

"Processing..." the holocron said, in the middle of it. "Processing... I’m sorry, m’dear, I’ve forgot yer search term. Must be going senile, huh. Whut wus it again?"

Atris threw up her hands and turned away from it, then noticed Ania for the first time. "Oh, er... Padawan."

Ania stood hastily. "Sorry, Master. I didn’t want to disturb you." And Atris was distracted enough that she could probably hedge around the issue of the note, just say she’d been sent by the Council and remanded into Atris’ charge. But then Master Lotli would surely check... "Um, Master Lotli asked me to give you this."

She handed the note over; Atris skimmed it briefly, and was about to answer when the holocron began to have a ‘heart attack’.

"Yes, very good, Padawan," she said hastily, thrusting the note back towards Ania. "I assume you know where my room is? Good, good... do go and unpack. I’m a little busy..."

As Ania thanked her and hurried to escape before Atris could remember what else the note had said, she heard that holocron roar, "Thus, die I! Thus, thus, thus! Now I am dead!" and Revan finally succumb to laughter.

Malak’s feet led him directly to Lysia’s door, later that evening. That was good, because his brain was desperately trying to convince itself that it wasn’t going there.

It wasn’t so much the admitting that she was right; he had been noticing for some time now that he didn’t seem to be doing as well as the others, and Lysia made sense. It was more the notion of asking her for help that worried him. That, and that he was heading towards what might tentatively be called her bedroom.

It was only after he had knocked on the door that he remembered that he did not know the name of Lysia’s Master, and when the door opened he had to expend some effort to not call the poor man ‘Master Moustache’ to his face.

"Good evening, Mas- er -"

"Ah," Master Moustache said. His facial hair waggled as he spoke; Malak, who had never had the chance to examine it close up before, found himself watching in amazement. "One of Lysia’s friends, aren’t you? From this morning?"

"Yes," Malak managed. It really was a magnificent growth, brown and luxuriantly droopy, and it looked as if it should be particularly soft. "Well, sort of. Uh, she said to come and see her if I got any free time."

"She did mention," the moustache said mildly. "Do come in. Just leave the door open while you’re in her room, won’t you?"

"Gladly," Malak said, still unable to take his eyes away from the moustache. He was only released from its entrancing spell when the Master attached to it turned away from him, nodding to a second door as he did so.

"She’s in there. As I said, leave the door open if you please."

Malak nodded, and went in.

He wasn’t really sure what to expect; Revan’s remarks about Lysia had led him to believe that there would be lots of pink and lace involved, but an accidental glimpse at Ania’s underwear while she was doing a handstand had told him equally that neither lace nor pink were quite so rare as Revan implied. Perhaps Ania was the odd one, then, because although a couple of the undergarments among the variety of junk strewn on Lysia’s floor were certainly very lacy - far, far lacier than Ania’s modest pink edging - not one of them was pink and, come to that, none of them were terribly revealing either.

What struck him the most, though, was the mess. Lysia lived in a pit. Force, and he’d thought Ania was messy.

Lysia was lying on her bed, which was the only clear horizontal space available, and reading some text or other. She looked up as he entered and, face splitting into a grin, hurled her datapad unceremoniously onto one of the heaps. Malak couldn’t help but wince.

"Knew you’d come," she said by way of a greeting. "Well, get your cloak off."

"We’re going to spar here?" Malak asked, aghast. There wasn’t a single inch of floorspace available, except the bed.

"Problem number one," Lysia snapped, "you only know how to fight on flat ground."

Malak considered this, found himself still unable to argue, and shrugged his cloak off. He was still looking for a relatively clean pile to balance it on when he heard Lysia’s lightsaber ignite and she leapt for him, controlling her bounce from the bed spookily well. He ducked, barely, and lost his footing as the pile underneath him crumbled. Lysia kept coming, but as Malak pulled out his own lightsaber he noticed that she, too, was sliding over the piles. Good, at least they were on an even foot-

Whatever he was standing on, which turned out moments later to be Lysia’s spare cloak, suddenly jerked out from under his feet. The movement was fast enough and violent enough that he toppled backwards, landed neatly on his arse and banged his head against a half-finished scuzzer droid, which came out of standby mode and started beeping violently. The cloak settled innocently on top of another pile; a little too innocently, and certainly too neatly. Malak glared up at Lysia, who was smirking down at him.

"Really helps to watch where you tread," she said. "Not to mention tricking the other bugger first."

"I want a rematch," Malak said.

"Well, duh. That’s why you’re here."

They kept at it for two hours, during which time Malak was defeated more times than he cared to count. By the end of it, though, he seemed at least to be getting somewhere; he was lasting longer, and even managed to temporarily trap Lysia in her own bedsheets at one point. It seemed like an excellent idea, until she threw her lightsaber away... then ran her hand slowly up his inner thigh. Malak let out an involuntary yell and dived backwards, leaving her to disentangle herself in her own good time.

"Foul," he said, when he trusted himself to speak again. "Bloody foul."

"Aren’t I," she said, and batted her eyelashes at him. "Huh, look at the time. We’d better stop. Pity, it was just getting interesting."

Malak, still somewhat shocked, arranged to meet her again in a few days’ time - and in a rather more public place, he insisted - bid goodbye to the moustache, and went to find his friends.

"A Sith," Ania said, and whistled. "You sure?"

"More or less," Revan said, and bit her lip. It was barely even a lip, now, just a line of bloody, torn flesh - and it obviously hurt, because she had begun to intermittently chew on her top lip instead. If her friend kept it up much longer, Ania thought, she might go mad from that alone.

"Well, I don’t see that it matters," she said, trying to project some level of confidence. "You’re your own person, aren’t you?"

"Yes, but - it’s a shock, you know? Oh..." Revan trailed off, "I suppose you do know. Wonderful day we’re having, between us."

Ania had to agree. About the only good thing that had happened was that Atris and Kreia, realising at long last that they were boring Revan witless, had dismissed both girls for the rest of the afternoon. Revan and Ania had, in the end, taken a stroll around Coruscant under the pretence of visiting the Senate, then headed back to wander through the Temple gardens when curfew hit. They should probably be getting back inside, but neither felt much like moving from the edge of the fountain that they were sitting on. They had too much to discuss - besides, as Revan pointed out, it was likely that their Masters were still engrossed in the stubborn holocron.

Revan sat up suddenly, peering into the fading light. "Malak’s over there."

Ania frowned at the approaching blob. It was Malak, Revan was right, but - Ania could tell because she was bonded to him. Revan had no such excuse. "How d’you know?"

Revan shrugged. "He’s Malak. I can always tell."

"Force, you lovesick little gizka."

"What? I’m not -"

"All right, lustsick. Oi, Baldy, we’re over here!"

"I do not fancy him," Revan muttered, so quietly that Ania barely caught it. "Hello, Malak."

"‘Lo," Malak said, and ruffled Ania’s hair. "Hello, Shortarse."

"Love what you’ve done with your scalp today. Where’ve you been?"

"Waiting for you to grow," Malak said, then shrugged. "Lysia asked for a rematch. It’s been a very weird day."

"Not you too," Revan groaned.

"Revan’s half-Sith and I’m a prophet," Ania said, in answer to Malak’s questioning look. "What’s your strange tale?"

"Lysia just felt me up," Malak said, staring from one to the other. "Sounds like you’ve both outdone me."

Revan snorted. "Lysia’s always trying to feel you up."

"Yes, but..." Malak hesitated just a little too long, Ania thought, before plunging on with his tale. "Not just after... oh, never mind. I’ll tell you later. Sith and prophet? Really?

Revan glanced at Ania, who shrugged. If Malak didn’t want to say, there was little point in pushing him.

"Hey," he said suddenly, peering at Revan, "What’s wrong with your mouth?"

"She’s been biting her lip all day," Ania said. "Tell you what, you fix it, and I’ll tell you mine first. You’ll like it, I got to shout at the Council..."