Chapter Text
You lay on your bunk, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling. Your eyes are dry and unfocused, and the cold of the metal bunk is leaching through the thin mattress and blankets into your skin. You could move, you could put on some of the clothes that you had strewn around the room in a frantic panic after you had woken up in here, alone, weeks ago. Shin had shoved you in here after the Eye had jumped into hyper-drive, and the only interaction you had with any of the crew was when Shin left trays of food that you refused to touch outside your quarters and stared at you while you ignored them. They always eventually wandered off, but only after you refused to acknowledge them for hours at a time.
You wanted to talk to them, you knew how close they were to snapping your neck at any moment, and that only fueled your interest. You didn’t though. You couldn’t spend your time fraternizing with the apprentice whose master had killed yours. It was the ultimate betrayal, you are an extension of your master, and even though Ahsoka was. Gone. You owed it to her not to betray her teachings like that. Except for the fact that your psyche was about to collapse upon itself if you did not stop dwelling on her death. She fell off that cliff after you hesitated to do the one thing she asked from you. She died at the hands of Baylan Skoll because of you, and you then chose him over her memory. You let Ahsoka die for nothing, giving him the map in the desperate hope that they’d help find Ezra in return for letting them find Thrawn.
Ahsoka was gone, the only part of her that remained was locked somewhere in the recesses of your brain. You felt as if there was a hole within you as if Ahsoka’s presence was something that completed you, which sounded sickly saccharine, something that would come out of romance novels, not from you. You never thought in a million years that you would ever feel a loss like this again, her absence gnawing at the already fraying ends of your sanity.
And so your thoughts idled over the fights you had had with Shin. They were so intense, and there was something more to them that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. They had so many chances to kill you, but they’ve always drawn back at the last second so that they could continue, doing what exactly? Dominating you?
They could have stabbed you through the second they had met, it wouldn’t have been difficult. But instead, they let you gain an advantage more than once, before remembering themselves and fighting back. You knew they could kill you with the Force, if not their saber right there, but they wanted to continue their game first.
They had gotten so close, their face inches away from yours, close enough to feel the heat from their mouth on your face. Their knee almost tucked in perfectly between legs, leaning you back so much you could have been prone on the floor. They had been close enough to see the freckles on their cheeks, and the eyeshadow that had basically sweat away at that point. Close enough that if they wanted to, they could have ripped out your throat with their flashing teeth or kissed you hard enough to flood your mouth with the taste of warm, salty, iron. They didn’t do either. They wanted to see what you could do, and their fights apparently satisfied some question they had, because once it had been answered, they ran you through in such a smoothly calculated move that you knew it was intentional to leave you alive. You were only here because of their mercy. They had missed every vital organ. You knew that the movement they had made that night was measured and intentional. They wanted to know how far you could go before they fully dominated you.
You didn't learn their name until they had almost finished you off on Seatos before Baylan had intervened, but you had spent months thinking of that fight and the distance that could have been closed between your bodies. The area had flooded with the electricity between you two, and the ozone from your sabers had flooded your nose. Even though your connection to the Force barely existed, you had felt the thrum of it every time Shin was there to strike. They flooded your thoughts, and you could not do anything to abate them. You knew you were sick to even think about the disheveled blonde in any terms besides the person who tried to kill you.
But even though the scar on your abdomen twanged with pain every time you thought about them, late at night, you buried your fingers inside yourself and thought about the permanent connection that you would have with them. They marked you as their prey, and on those nights following your first encounter, you gasped, burying your face into your pillow. You thought about their hands wrapped around your neck, teeth biting and tearing tender skin. In those early hours of the mornings, you thought about them kneeling, their saber burning through your abdomen, instantly cauterizing the hole they left in you. The memory of their piercing gaze made the scene something more than a murder attempt. You almost wished they had done more to damage your skin and left more marks on you, before they had run away as Ahsoka landed. You felt immense shame about these thoughts about the enemy, and withdrew from Ahsoka, skipping training and kept to your quarters. Drawing their face again and again, trying to replicate their expressions from that night, and always failing. You slept with those drawings tucked underneath your mattress while dreaming about them, again and again.
On Seatos, they were waiting for you, poised to strike, posing atop the bank, before dropping their cloak with a dramatic flourish and hopping down in front of you. The words slipping out of their lips "Going somewhere?" had been tinged with what you thought seemed tinged with lust and self-satisfaction. You knew? It couldn't be lust, that was you, constantly confusing things in your head, and projecting your feelings onto them. They knew you'd eventually seek them out if given enough time. Once they locked eyes with you, you instantly knew they had sensed there was a spot in which they inhabited the dark shameful recesses of your brain, and it excited them. They projected a microcosm of the thoughts they had been thinking back to you, and you had almost gasped at the images that flooded your brain but refused to let Shin and Ahsoka see your face shift. Shin smirked.
Ahsoka was there, but Shin barely spared her a second glance after they had met your eyes. Ahsoka sensed it, the tension between you and Shin, the way you didn’t break eye contact, and she had glanced knowingly between you two. You ignored that look, you knew what she was thinking, but all your energy was being channeled into hiding your thoughts from her, even if you couldn't shield them from Shin. You wanted Shin to yourself, but you knew that if Ahsoka had truly seen your thoughts, she would have refused to leave you alone with them. You knew how she felt about people forming connections like that, and she would do anything in her power to prevent you and her from going down the same path Anakin had.
And so, that was the last time you had truly spoken once you told her to run and get the map from Baylan. All because you wanted to keep fighting someone whose name you didn’t even know. All because, just as Huyang said, she was the worst example of a Jedi he had ever seen. You couldn’t keep your emotions in check, you couldn’t prevent yourself from wanting more, whether that was a connection with Shin or to see Ezra again. You couldn’t put your own selfish desires above the lives of billions of people and star systems that faced death once Thrawn came back into power.
All those consequences were resting on you when you stayed back to fight Shin, and they could have killed you, and then all of it. All of it would have been a waste. Shin should have killed you, once they realized you had no connection to the Force. They had the advantage, even with your blasters and armor. But instead, they panicked, and their fighting became clumsy. They attacked you like a frenzied animal, hyper-focused on hunting their prey, missing and stumbling, and that hyper-focus made their reflexes slow, and their frenetic blows glanced off your armor if they even made contact with you at all. Shin was hypnotizing to watch when feral. Their normally emotionless face and unblinking stare were replaced by a harrowing grimace that betrayed how much they wanted to display their power to you.
But despite their fighting style becoming more rudimentary, the longer they fought, they were still more skillful than you with a saber. They managed to get you onto the ground, straddling your hips with their light saber raised, poised to plunge into your chest before you had discharged your blaster. You startled them, and the shock on their face betrayed that you managed to throw them off enough to change their perception of you in their brain. Instead of finishing the deed, they stared into your eyes, their eye shadow dripping down their face with their sweat. Without a beat, they discharged a smoke grenade and escaped back to their master, running back with their tail between their legs.
You were in such shock at the events that you just laid on the cold damp ground covered in rotting leaves, for a minute, mouthing “You have no power” to yourself, before regaining your senses and chasing after them.
If you hadn’t been so slow, you could have saved Ahsoka.
Instead of helping your master, you let yourself have a moment where you almost let Shin do it. You wanted to see if they’d truly kill you, or just leave you bleeding out on the forest floor. Ahsoka would have managed to save you, pack and heal a wound that once again proved to you that Shin was not some fantasy that you made up in your twisted brain. Why? Why did you wait long enough to get into a position where the rabid wolf padawan could kill you again and again? What drew you to them?
The scar they had left you itched at the thought of them. You didn’t scratch, all you could do was stare at the ceiling, because every time you closed your eyes, it seemed as if the darkness behind your lids would close in, suffocating you, trapping you in the airless dark of your consciousness. So you stared. The recycled cold air of the ship was almost freezing, and it raised the hair on your skin. You refused to shiver. You were stubborn, and you deserved to serve penance for her death for the rest of your life. You would tolerate the cold and hunger until it became too much, and you either found Ezra or died.
You heard the distant sound of bare feet stepping across the expanse of ice-cold metal, coming from the hallway that offshoots from the main corridor that leads directly towards the imposing door that separated you from the rest of the ship’s meager bare bones of a crew. You tensed.
You didn’t want to talk to anyone. Whether that was Baylan, or. Morgan. Or. Shin. However, out of all the people present on the ship, you’d prefer slithery, murderous, tall blonde Shin to anyone else. They were fascinating to observe in a controlled environment like the Eye. Their brief smirks interwoven with their reserved stingingly cold facade, so different from when they had fought. Their unrelenting abhorrence directed towards Morgan, starkly contrasted with the fatherly relationship they had with Baylan. And every interaction they had with you was tinged with the chilling look you had last seen on their face when without a second thought, they had tried to strangle you to death only weeks ago.
You were still holding your breath, hoping that whoever was about to be outside your door would hear nothing coming from within your room and go away. Because no matter who it is, they will not have anything positive to do. The light steps came close, stopping outside your door. You waited, but they didn’t knock. After a minute of no movement outside and no indication that someone was still there, you were itching with impatience. You sat up and swung your legs out and over the side of the bunk. You pushed yourself off to the floor and landed with a softer thud than you expected.
You walked across the floor, silently hissing breath whistling through your teeth as the pads of your feet made stinging contact with the burning cold steel that made up the floor of your quarters. Stopping before the door, you hesitated before hitting the button that would open it. The door slid open with a -chunk- revealing Shin standing there with their disturbingly placid face. They cross their arms lean against the door and twitch their lips into a grin, trying to look coy and failing miserably, looking like a simpering school child.
“Shin.” You grit out through torn lips and bruised throat, and stare at them pointedly, waiting for a reply. You did not let your face betray your thoughts about them.
“Wren” drips off their lips like tar, sticky and acrid. They crane their head to look behind you and arch an eyebrow.
“Really, -Wren-, you're unhygienic. I’m sure your master would have been displeased to see that you’re taking care of yourself like this.”
You moved to block her view while trying to avert your eyes from the cropped shirt and long skirts Shin was wearing. The shirt revealed their thin muscled arms, and the milky expanse of their toned abdomen flecked with dark moles. As they shifted, the waistband of their skirt slowly slid to show their navel and the slight hint of a hipbone. Those glimpses of skin were almost more indecent than if Shin had shown up as naked as the day they had been born.
They follow your eyes that are lasering holes into the wall behind their shoulder. Their eyes narrowed slightly, glinting with self-satisfied triumph.
You shifted backward, barely noticeable, “What do you want?” mouth cracking open and barely letting out a squeak, your vocal cords dry from disuse.
“What? I have to want something to visit you, little moon. You wound me, Wren.” Shin pressed their hand onto their chest in a display of mock hurt.
You flinched at the little moon comment, the shock at the name must have shown on your face, because Shin grinned, showing off their canines. You almost started to wonder where Shin had gotten that nickname from. But you resigned yourself to the realization that your weak attempts during the few months of training that you had undergone would do nothing to shield your mind while under stress, from a loth-cat, let alone a powerful Force user that had been training for years.
You stand there silently, waiting for their dramatics to cease, ignoring the rising pitch in your ears that shot conflicting feels to your core, every time they spoke.
“Baylan wanted me to visit and see how you’re settling in.” Pausing to evaluate you, your body was thinner and your muscles had shrunk. Your hair was unbrushed, hitting your shoulders, prickling at your neck. You were aware of your rumpled clothes and the bags under your eyes, and the shame of being seen like this made your body involuntarily crumple inward.
“Good that I did check, or else you’d let yourself shrivel to death.” They push their way in, brushing past you as if you were less substantial than a dust mote.