Shiraya's Odyssey
The instructions from her brother had been explicit, just as much as they were cryptic.
Come alone, trust no one. If anyone asks where you're heading, lie.
And that'd been the entirety of it, with no further messages after she tried to ask more questions, and pressed for additional details. Just silence. Something that was becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Again.
By the time she reached the coordinates he'd sent her, the silence had settled into something heavier than irritation, and Briana, seated alone inside the dimly lit waiting bay, spun lazily in the one good chair she'd found bolted to the floor. Around and around. The repetitive motion gave her body something to do while her mind chased increasingly unpleasant possibilities.
The station had been abandoned long enough that some elements of nature had begun the natural process of slipping through the cracks to reclaim the space once more. Vines crept through fractures in the ceiling panels, thin tendrils dangling between rusted support beams. Moss grew in damp corners. A row of ticket kiosks stood silent along the far wall, their displays black beneath a thick layer of dust, potentially mold. Nearby, an open maintenance panel exposed bundles of severed wiring.
Briana breathed in the deep scent of vegetation musk and looked down at her chrono for the hundredth time, checking her comms for good measure to see if she'd missed any new alerts. There was nothing, of course, but she opened the thread anyway to gaze at the last two messages she'd sent him.
"Are you in some kind of trouble?"
"I'm here, where are you?"
Bastila had explained some of Brandyn's struggles before she'd left, and like the imp she was, even offered to send her along with a tracking device to help find him more easily. It'd seemed absurd at the time, so she'd refused - not yet desperate enough to cross that boundary unless her hand was forced. But the minute hand continued to ticked by, and doubt around her choices crept inside.
Closing her eyes, she drew in a slow breath through her nose and held it until the pressure in her chest steadied, forcing the anxious rhythm of her body to answer to her discipline. There were other ways to search for him, truer ways.
Like casting a wide net at sea to catch fish, the Force was sent outwards at her command.
The bond between her and Brandyn never felt entirely natural, no matter how many times she tried to accept it as part of herself. It was unlike any of the natural bonds she chose, their dyad always existing beneath everything else like its own kind of gravity. Beyond anything that words could adequately capture. Most days, she experienced it only in glimpses, a sudden pull beneath her thoughts, an echo of a feeling that did not belong to her, the faint awareness of another presence moving somewhere beyond sight, yet never entirely beyond reach.
It didn't take long to find him. It never did when she searched this way.
Relief arrived so quickly that she almost laughed at every ugly possibility she'd constructed over the last hour. He wasn't dead, missing, or trapped somewhere beyond her reach. He was close enough that, when her eyes opened, she could see the glint off his lightsaber swinging at his hip and caught his familiar gait.
Abandoning the chair she'd been using to occupy herself, Briana rose to her feet and moved to greet him. "Took you long enough," she admonished lightly. "Did a Nexu catch you in its teeth, or something? Keep you from being unable to answer a simple message?"
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