Played by Talverin
Vendryn's stride faltered just enough that the sand whispered under his boots. He had been prepared for many answers. Calculation. Caution. A polite lie dressed as principle. He had not been prepared for that.
If I ever realized that I was influencing you to become someone you weren't… I think that I would try to stop.
He stared at her as if she had offered to set fire to a library. The bafflement sat plainly on his face, unguarded by the usual careful arrangement of expression. "You would… stop." It was not quite a question. "Even if the influence made me kinder. Even if it made me help rather than harm." His upper hands opened, then closed, as if trying to grasp a shape that refused to exist. "Where do you draw the line, Lumiya? If I become better because you exist near me—not because of some tether in the Force, but because you are you—would you still wish to undo it? Would you ask me to ignore the person standing in front of me so that I might remain… unaltered?"
The questions piled, each one nesting neatly inside the last, and he felt the familiar tilt of his mind sliding toward analysis—categories, variables, the architecture of influence. He recognized it as it happened. There you go again. He exhaled through his nose and forced the thought aside, stepping mentally backward into something messier and less comfortable. Feeling, rather than mapping.
The experiment with the imagined serpent had failed in the most reassuring way possible. She had looked. She had seen nothing. She had attributed it to disorientation. A tightness he had not named loosened in his chest. She cannot hear the thoughts. Probably. Almost certainly. Relief was a strange garment. It did not fit him well, but he wore it anyway.
Then his gaze dropped, unbidden, to the faint outline of the hilt beneath her robe.
He could not quite restrain himself.
"You could have cut the railing," he said, and there was no accusation in it—only the stubborn insistence of a man who treated tools as tools. "Had you thought to use the lightsaber at the time. A blade is a specialized instrument, nothing more. It does not become something else merely because one prefers not to draw it." The words left him before he could decide whether they were helpful. He heard them in the air and felt, with abrupt and unwelcome clarity, that he sounded sulky.
The realization did not help.
I am sulking.
I know I am sulking.
Knowing I am sulking is not making me less sulky.
He turned the observation over like a pebble, simultaneously musing on the spiral and resenting that he was caught in it. His lower hands fidgeted with the empty harness at his hip. Heat crept faintly along the high bones of his cheeks.
He stopped walking.
The wind moved between them, carrying the last breath of the day's warmth. Vendryn drew himself a fraction straighter and attempted, with visible effort, a humbler tone.
"I apologize, Lumiya." The formality sat differently now—less armor, more effort. "My curiosity often gets the better of me. Testing what has formed between us—pressing at it as though it were a lock or a theorem—is perhaps not the wisest course. Not at the moment. You have already given more than any reasonable person would, and I have repaid you with experiments and questions when rest would have served us both better." He glanced at her hand, the one that had ached when he had pressed his thumbnail into his own palm, and the last of the sulkiness soured into something closer to shame. "I will endeavor to keep my inquiries… less tactile. For a time." He lightly prodded at his palm, as if feeling out the edges of where he'd dug his nail into his skin. It wasn't an effort to cause more pain; it was, instead, more a realization that he had injured himself in a rather inopportune place given the situation.
A faint, rueful breath escaped him—almost a laugh, if one were generous. "Though I make no promises regarding the questions themselves. Those, I fear, will arrive whether I invite them or not."
He started forward again, matching her slower pace toward the camp, four sapphire eyes no longer hunting the empty air behind her. The wreck dwindled at their backs, reedy pillars of smoke trickling up to vanish in the breeze.
Lumiya Dara
If I ever realized that I was influencing you to become someone you weren't… I think that I would try to stop.
He stared at her as if she had offered to set fire to a library. The bafflement sat plainly on his face, unguarded by the usual careful arrangement of expression. "You would… stop." It was not quite a question. "Even if the influence made me kinder. Even if it made me help rather than harm." His upper hands opened, then closed, as if trying to grasp a shape that refused to exist. "Where do you draw the line, Lumiya? If I become better because you exist near me—not because of some tether in the Force, but because you are you—would you still wish to undo it? Would you ask me to ignore the person standing in front of me so that I might remain… unaltered?"
The questions piled, each one nesting neatly inside the last, and he felt the familiar tilt of his mind sliding toward analysis—categories, variables, the architecture of influence. He recognized it as it happened. There you go again. He exhaled through his nose and forced the thought aside, stepping mentally backward into something messier and less comfortable. Feeling, rather than mapping.
The experiment with the imagined serpent had failed in the most reassuring way possible. She had looked. She had seen nothing. She had attributed it to disorientation. A tightness he had not named loosened in his chest. She cannot hear the thoughts. Probably. Almost certainly. Relief was a strange garment. It did not fit him well, but he wore it anyway.
Then his gaze dropped, unbidden, to the faint outline of the hilt beneath her robe.
He could not quite restrain himself.
"You could have cut the railing," he said, and there was no accusation in it—only the stubborn insistence of a man who treated tools as tools. "Had you thought to use the lightsaber at the time. A blade is a specialized instrument, nothing more. It does not become something else merely because one prefers not to draw it." The words left him before he could decide whether they were helpful. He heard them in the air and felt, with abrupt and unwelcome clarity, that he sounded sulky.
The realization did not help.
I am sulking.
I know I am sulking.
Knowing I am sulking is not making me less sulky.
He turned the observation over like a pebble, simultaneously musing on the spiral and resenting that he was caught in it. His lower hands fidgeted with the empty harness at his hip. Heat crept faintly along the high bones of his cheeks.
He stopped walking.
The wind moved between them, carrying the last breath of the day's warmth. Vendryn drew himself a fraction straighter and attempted, with visible effort, a humbler tone.
"I apologize, Lumiya." The formality sat differently now—less armor, more effort. "My curiosity often gets the better of me. Testing what has formed between us—pressing at it as though it were a lock or a theorem—is perhaps not the wisest course. Not at the moment. You have already given more than any reasonable person would, and I have repaid you with experiments and questions when rest would have served us both better." He glanced at her hand, the one that had ached when he had pressed his thumbnail into his own palm, and the last of the sulkiness soured into something closer to shame. "I will endeavor to keep my inquiries… less tactile. For a time." He lightly prodded at his palm, as if feeling out the edges of where he'd dug his nail into his skin. It wasn't an effort to cause more pain; it was, instead, more a realization that he had injured himself in a rather inopportune place given the situation.
A faint, rueful breath escaped him—almost a laugh, if one were generous. "Though I make no promises regarding the questions themselves. Those, I fear, will arrive whether I invite them or not."
He started forward again, matching her slower pace toward the camp, four sapphire eyes no longer hunting the empty air behind her. The wreck dwindled at their backs, reedy pillars of smoke trickling up to vanish in the breeze.
Lumiya Dara
