Shiraya's Odyssey
She recalled little of the details surrounding their escape from Thyferra, aside from the jarring leap of the ship as they took off from the surface, paired with the echo of her brother’s agony, rapidly crowding inside her mind. The mental suffocation of that darkness, and the sheer willpower it took to pilot herself and Rik to safety, left little room for coherent thought. She'd flown almost entirely on instinct, until the stars stretched into brilliant lines and hyperspace swallowed them whole. Only then, as the distance between her and Brandyn grew, did her mind finally begin to quiet.
Exhaustion settled into her bones almost immediately, accompanied by the familiar, unnatural chill of space. For several moments, Briana remained hunched over the controls, staring blankly into the swirling blue beyond the viewport. The Force had returned to them, but after pouring so much of herself into holding the Republic and its Jedi together, fighting through its absence, and enduring the violent intrusion of the dyad when it came back, she'd nothing left with which to reach for it.
Her muscles felt weak, and every thought moved as though wading through a water so deep, she could not see, nor reach, the bottom.
There were things she probably should have said to Rik, comforts she should have offered. He'd watched an old friend die below, escaped fields crawling with horrors capable of turning the living into monsters. But the cockpit was deathly still, and whatever kind words she meant to offer, laid somewhere far beyond the reach of her exhaustion. Briana swallowed and looked up when the navicomputer confirmed their course, immediately working the controls again, before fumbling with the restraints and freeing herself.
“Autopilot’s set,” she managed, her voice little more than a rasp. “I’m going to clean up."
Each step toward her quarters felt heavier than the last. But once the door hissed shut behind her, Briana was quick to seal her ruined clothing away for decontamination and step beneath the shower, turning the water hot enough to sting as she scrubbed Thyferra’s smoke, soil, and sweat from her skin until it ran clear. Still, the phantom residue of the planet, and of everything that'd happened down there, clung to her in a way no amount of scrubbing could ever erase. Emerging from the fresher, and with her hair still damp, she barely made it to the bed before collapsing onto the mattress, sleep immediately dragging her under.
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She lay still for a long while after she'd woken up, staring into the blackness and listening to the subdued hyperdrives of the Vere while trying to piece her thoughts together.
Her hand slid across the blanket to reach for her datapad for the umpteenth time, checking to see if the message she’d sent Vizion was answered yet, clinging to the faint hope that a response might be waiting... only to find there was nothing there.
Briana stared at the unanswered message until the screen dimmed on its own. There was nothing she could do about Vizion’s silence except wait, tempting as it was to send him a follow up message. Her thoughts swam with anxiety, trying to grasp some tangible reason for it, beyond the one that sat at the front of her mind: that he'd already decided she wasn't worth all this trouble.
It felt like she was watching her life come apart in slow motion, but the more she tried to grab for all the unraveling threads, the easier they seemed to slip through her fingers.
A noise from beyond her door reminder Briana she was not alone. Rik was here, and the memory of leaving him alone in the cockpit sat uneasily beneath her ribs, pulling her from the tumult of her own thoughts. Enough that it finally pulled her from bed.
Pushing aside the blankets, Briana tugged on the first pair of clean clothes she could find, and dragged her fingers through the knots in her sleep-tangled hair, growing frustrated with the process before giving up altogether and throwing it into a makeshift ponytail. The datapad remained clutched in her hand as she stepped out of her quarters, her thumb instinctively waking the darkened screen before the door even finished hissing shut behind her. With a sigh, she made sure the sound was on and pocketed the device before making the short trek to Rik's quarters.
Pausing outside his door, she gave it a gentle knock.
“Rik?” she called softly. “Can I come in?”
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