Chapter Text
I only want
your body, or this city, or everything. To be
where pressure evens itself. To satisfy. Or be
what escapes alive
and continues to burn
—“Drinking with Bernoulli in Wicker Park,” Melissa Leigh Gore
The first bounty hunter finds them on the Vermulus Space Station in the Outer Rim, a Republic-owned mining station that's grown to be a common pit-stop for travellers.
There isn't much on that little island. A lot of fish, and a few vegetables in a small hydroponic garden. She remembers the first time she saw The Stranger watering those plants, an oddly jarring juxtaposition against the man who had once slaughtered a company of Jedi. But other than that, his supplies had only been meant for one, and they dwindled rapidly with two.
It’s strange to sleep near him, eat meals together, and train together in the same space. It isn't anything like the rigid structure of the Jedi Academy, the careful formality of it all. There's a routine here with him, but it's what they make of it. It's impossible to not to share some bizarre sense of domestic intimacy with one another.
In the end, their sleeping arrangements had been the tipping point. Osha had been the one who pushed for a supply run.
“Take the bed, Osha,” he'd said to her when she realised he'd been sleeping on a thin blanket and folded clothes for a pillow, and she had taken the pallet he normally slept on. “I don't need much.”
“Maybe we can alternate,” she’d suggested when he wouldn’t give in. He’d given her a look that plainly stated what he thought of that plan.
“If you don't take the bed, then neither of us will, and what's the point of that?”
He'd called her bluff later. She'd tried to settle on the hard rock floor and gave in after half an hour of tossing and turning.
Osha drew the line at sharing a bed. But the thought had come to mind.
So: Vermulus. Supplies. A bedroll. Blankets.
They'd split up. The Stranger went to get food and spices, and she had gone to get the other supplies.
It's silly, how the bounty hunter gets her. A classic trick: a child calling for help in a dark alleyway, a gut instinct that she ignores in favour of chasing a little boy’s voice in the shadow.
A metallic ball rolls to her feet. Osha recognises the threat a second too late—the ball explodes into a net that sends her flying deeper into the alley in a tangle of corded rope. She crashes into the ground, right at the feet of a masked woman.
“Osha Aniseya?” The Zeltran bounty hunter flips open a device and a holo of Osha's face rotates in the air.
Osha slices open the net with a hidden blade. She pulls another out in quick succession and whips it at the bounty hunter.
The woman dodges, but it catches her cheek. Osha scrambles to her feet as the bounty hunter raises a stun gun.
Time slows.
Osha's hand is outstretched. The bounty hunter is floating in the air, held aloft by the Force. By Osha.
She pants with the effort to keep her focus steady. “Who are you?” she demands.
The Zeltran woman wheezes, and Osha realizes that she'd begun to choke off her air supply. Her control in the Force is still unpolished: she only knows how to wield it with a heavy hand, all or nothing.
Osha releases her grip on the bounty hunter’s throat and she crumples to the ground, gasping for breath.
A mistake. The hunter, fear now in her eyes, and backed into a corner, reaches for her blaster instead.
“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” Osha says calmly. The air around them grows thick, the Force waiting to be used. “Who sent you?”
A hoarse chuckle spills from her mouth. “First one, eh? Lucky me,” she rasps. “You've got a bounty on you, girl. Thirty thousand credits.”
The number catches Osha off-guard. It seems impossibly high—thirty thousand, for a Trade Fed meknek?
A meknek who killed her Jedi master.
Sol's lifeforce in her hands. His breath, his throat. His choked off love. His absolution.
A burst of white-hot pain on her thigh: a blaster fired in the midst of her grief-stricken distraction. The next shot Osha barely manages to dodge. She curses as she scrambles to recenter herself in the Force, to sense her, to stop her—
Osha feels him before she sees him.
The Stranger appears at the mouth of the alleyway, cortosis helmet on, cloak swaying behind him.
His wrist flicks. The bounty hunter's spine slams against the wall.
Osha can't see his face, but she can feel his disappointment.
“You have questions,” The Stranger says through the vocoder. It doesn't matter that she's seen his face, heard his true voice. There's something about him that still strikes a chord of terror in her, even now. “Consider this another lesson: take your answers from her.”
Osha looks uncertainly between them. The bounty hunter begins to plead for her life, but her words choke off in garbled nonsense as The Stranger briefly cuts off her air supply. “I've never done that,” she says, but she remembers seeing her mother do it once, a lifetime ago. Taken over someone's mind. Spoken to them. Searched through them.
“You have,” The Stranger says. “Try.”
Osha has no idea what he’s talking about. She thinks she would know if she’s manipulated someone’s mind before, but there’s a conviction in his voice that makes her pause.
Osha looks at the bounty hunter straight in the eye. Finds her in the in the Force, then finds her mind. There: she sees a way through. A fragile mind, mental defenses brittle and borderline non-existent. The walls of the station melt away into a navy void the colour of the ocean floor. All sound disappears except for her voice.
Who placed the bounty on me?
The mind resists. Osha pushes. The bounty hunter cries out in pain. Images come to her, unbidden. The Hutt Clan. A contract. An unfamiliar name. Not the Republic. Not the Trade Federation. Just some intermediary, an unknown third-party bankrolling for someone larger.
Someone like the Jedi.
Osha pushes harder, searching for any trace of Mae.
No bounty on her twin. No other information about her, either.
Osha exhales and releases her grasp on the bounty hunter's mind. When she blinks, she's back on the station, and the woman is lying on the ground, alive but shaking, a black shadow receding from her eyes.
The Stranger does not ask her to finish the job. Not this time.
He uses his blade to end the bounty hunter's life. Then, he rifles through her belongings, tossing the stun gun to her and taking the blaster for himself. “Ah! Perfect,” he says, the tone of his voice at odds with the vocoder. He holds up a credit stick between his index and middle finger. “Should use this up before we go.”
Osha feels like she might throw up. She limps away from the body, pressing the heel of her hand to her eyes.
The Stranger is suddenly beside her. “You're hurt.”
They both glance down at her singed flesh, raw and reddened tissue throbbing painfully at her thigh. “It's fine,” she grits out. “Hope you picked up some medical supplies.”
A pause. “That wasn't on the list.”
“Well, it is now. Let's just—” she makes the mistake of turning back and seeing the body, and she has to shut her eyes for a moment. “We should get out of here as soon as possible.”
“Hold still.”
“What?”
“Hold still,“ he says impatiently.
The Stranger waves his palm over her wound. The flesh starts to knit itself back together, the skin healing until it starts to form a scab. Then it stops.
The pain quiets down to a twinge. Osha stares at it in astonishment. It explains how quickly her side had healed.
“Medical supplies,” he says, holding up the dead woman's credit chips. “Then we leave.”
“What did you mean when you said I’ve done that before? Go into someone's mind like that?”
Back on the island, they finally reach the little cave he calls home. Osha starts putting things away before Qimir uses the Force to do it for her. She doesn't know if she'll ever get used to it, seeing him use this power so casually, in such a mundane way.
He pulls out a roll of bandages and antibiotic salve from his pack.
“Have a seat. I’ll patch you up.”
“I've got it,” she says, raising her eyebrows at him when he purposefully moves his hands out of reach. “And you didn't answer my question.”
“Let me help you, Osha.”
“You've already helped me enough.” She hesitates, an idea coming to mind. “Will you answer me if I let you?”
A small bargain, compared to everything else. Her life, to free her sister from the deal he'd made with her. Her life, to become his acolyte. Her life, because the Jedi she once revered would kill her if they found her.
There is no other choice, but she thinks she would have still chosen this.
“Sure,” Qimir says, an easy acquiesence.
There is no other way around it. Osha slides off her pants, hyperaware of his eyes on her, watching her as she undresses. The burn sits right at the top of her thigh, exposed now as she stands in her underwear.
Qimir pulls up a chair in front of her. “Let me know if you want to sit,” he murmurs, and begins to clean her wound.
She grits her teeth. “I'm good.”
Osha flinches slightly when he dabs at a particularly raw spot, and he reflexively grabs her thigh to keep her still. She inhales sharply. “All right?”
“Yeah.” The word comes out a little more breathlessly than she intends. The Stranger's hand flexes, his fingers brushing against her inner thigh. Heat blooms low on her stomach and she goes rigid.
He's quiet as he applies the salve. Then, once he starts unrolling the bandage, he says, “You did it to me. When you put on the helmet.”
“What?” Osha makes the mistake of looking down at him. The sight of him sends a rush to her head: Qimir sitting in front of her, hand clasped around her thigh, head slightly bent, almost as if in supplication. It makes her dizzy, and she braces her hand on his shoulder for balance. Qimir tips his head up in question. She snatches her hand back.
“When you saw that vision of yourself, you lost control. Had to fight to get it off of you.”
“I didn't know. I didn't mean to.”
“I know. It’s interesting that your power manifested that way,“ he says thoughtfully. “You have an affinity for the mind.”
“My mom could do that,“ she says. “She got into Master Torbin's head.”
“Mae mentioned that. Curious how she never seemed to have the same talent for it.”
“She took after our mother more,” Osha reflects. “She always was stronger than me in our training sessions.”
Qimir looks at her contemplatively. “Yet you were the one strong enough to defeat someone with only the Force.”
Osha still can't think about it for too long. Sol. Her mother. Mae. Her grief crashes over her in a wave. Some days that wave is strong enough to pull her under.
Hesitantly, he reaches for her hand. She can feel him beside her and in the Force. A steady presence. Anchored in his own self and in the Force. He would hate to hear the comparison, but it's almost Jedi-like, his state of calm regard. The roiling, churning chaos of her own aura startles to settle next to his.
He holds her hand, and she lets him.
Those first few days had passed in a numb haze.
Osha doesn't remember them much beyond running with the Stranger to his ship, then moving through lightspeed and disappearing into the stars.
The Stranger hadn't pushed her to train right away. She had expected the drills to start immediately. For him to start goading her, taunting her, to excavate her emotions and channel them into her training.
She had not expected him to cook for her. Or to leave her alone, for the most part, except to tinker at his table and repair his helmet. To gently try to persuade her to eat something, anything.
He took a different approach on the third day. The start of her training, he’d called it, and took her for a long walk by the ocean at sunrise. He asked her to try and ground herself in the Force, to feel it all around her in every living thing. The creatures waddling on the rocky sand. The waves crashing onto the shore. The salt on her tongue from the ocean breeze. The warmth of the sun falling on her cheeks.
He did this for the next three days at each sunrise and sunset. Eventually, she could count every single little skura waddling along the beach, and find each one hiding in the nooks and crannies of the cave. Then she could feel him, wherever he was.
Things changed at the end of the week.
He had showed her a news report from the Republic. The Jedi were conducting an internal review following the actions of a rogue Jedi. Sol.
“That's not right,” she had said, reading it all at first with confusion, and then realization at what they had done.
Osha had killed Sol, and yet she still found herself angry on his behalf, at the lies they were telling, even as it meant Mae's exoneration for her crimes, even as it meant her own freedom from accountability for his death. She had tried to justify it at first, automatically, because she’d grown up believing that the Jedi council is always right and fair and just. Only a few days ago, she had thought of turning herself in and explaining what had happened, as if that would solve everything.
“The truth threatens their political reach in the Republic,” The Stranger had said. “They will never take accountability for what they did to you and your family.”
There had been an echo of familiarity in that statement, as if he had been speaking from personal experience. But that fleeting moment of curiosity had been overcome by the burst of pent-up anger and guilt and grief spilling out of her.
She felt like she was choking. Drowning.
Sol smiling at her and hugging her after getting her saber.
Sol saving her life.
Leaving her sister for dead.
Sol's unwavering belief in her.
Sol admitting to killing their mother. Sol justifying the dead bodies of her family, strewn against the fire-ravaged floor. Sol's love for her, choking in his throat.
How could she kill him? How could she not?
She'd broken apart into sobs as the Stranger watched, and she'd hated him in that moment, hated that he was right, hated that the man who killed her friends was the same man who'd shown her the truth, who'd trained her sister and tried to kill her, and she had wanted nothing from the hand that had reached out to touch her shoulder again, just like he had before. She wanted to go away from him, from that cave, and all she remembers is latching onto that feeling so strongly that everything warped around her—
And she’d found herself at the edge of the shore, power bursting from her in a shockwave that sent ripples across the water.
The Stranger caught up to her the same moment dead fish floated up to the surface in a thirty-feet radius around her. For the first time since she’d met him, he looked genuinely surprised.
She’d stared at it all in horror, not understanding how it happened.
A few beats of silence passed. The Stranger looked at the water, then back at her, and he said, “Thanks for getting dinner.”
His response was so ridiculous that it snapped her right out of her downward spiral. The sight of what she had done scared her, but seeing his unfazed reaction settled her nerves. He wasn't looking at her like she was a monster. Like she was a threat to be neutralized. Removed. Rejected.
The levity in his voice faded then. “What are you feeling right now?“
She took a breath, and then another. Felt the wind, smelled the ocean, saw his steady gaze on her. “Guilt,” she said. “Anger. Grief.”
He'd asked her this question before. He wanted her to express it in simple terms, without justification or context. Just the emotion.
“Good. Don't try to bury how you feel, Osha. Feel it, and use it to control your power. If you don't, it will control you.” Unspoken was the result all around them.
She swallowed and admitted, “That's going to be hard. For me.”
“You can unlearn what was taught to you,” The Stranger said, his voice almost gentle. “We will do it together.”
She thought about the saber he’d put into her hand. Sol’s weapon, the one he’d used to kill her mother. The one she had bled after in her fury and grief.
She was here. She had chosen this.
“I’m not calling you Master.”
He shrugged, seemingly unbothered. He’d still gotten what he wanted, which was an apprentice—an acolyte—in her. No matter what she called herself or what she called him. “Fine.”
“What should I call you? Qimir?”
In her mind, he was the Stranger when he wore his helmet and cloak, something terrifying and ruthless and other. But when everything came off, it was almost as if he were someone different.
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Sure.”
She was almost certain he agreed to appease her, but if he had no name otherwise, it would have to do.
Qimir turned to walk back to the cave, and she followed at his side.