:: HERO of KORRIBAN ::
Home should have felt familiar.
Judah Lesan had spent enough of his life leaving one place for another that he had learned not to romanticize the return. Sometimes home changed while you were gone. Sometimes you changed more. After more than a year in Sith custody, an escape he still could not fully piece together, and the violence of Thyferra waiting for him almost the moment he was free, Judah was not entirely sure which possibility bothered him more.
He remained in the cockpit long after the ship had settled onto the landing pad, one hand resting loosely against the controls while the engines wound down around him. The silence that followed felt different from the silence of a cell. There were no guards outside the door, no restraints waiting, and no expectation that
Srina Talon
might appear simply because she wished to remind him who controlled the room. Judah knew that much, yet some part of him still sat too straight in the chair, listening for footsteps that were never going to come.That habit irritated him.
So did the pain in his ribs.
Thyferra had made ignoring both considerably harder.
The battle had been an ugly thing to walk into after finally getting free. Judah had barely started understanding what had been done to him before he found himself surrounded by fire, collapsing structures, Sith, Jedi, and the kind of violence that made everyone involved certain they were justified. Then the Force had vanished. Whatever the artifact had done, it had ripped away the thing Judah had relied on his entire life, and every injury he had carried out of captivity had suddenly become impossible to hide from himself.
He remembered the weight of the metal around him. He remembered his mouth sewn shut. He remembered trying to work himself free while everything around him descended further into chaos. He remembered Lorn firing. Mercy attacking. Srina there again, impossibly close to the center of another nightmare. The details still came in pieces, but the feeling remained whole enough to follow him home.
Judah rubbed a hand over his face and finally stood. Then there was the lightsaber that should have shifted at his belt with the movement. That was another problem he had not solved.
Red.
He still did not know why.
The first time he had ignited it after escaping, the color had been absurd enough to make him laugh despite everything else happening around him. The humor had not survived long. Every attempt to understand the weapon seemed to lead back toward memories that would not cooperate, dreams he could not trust, and images of his wife dying by his own hand.
He had stopped forcing the issue.
For now.
Judah left the ship and stepped into the city with his jacket pulled close against the evening air. The streets were busier than he expected, full of people moving through ordinary lives that had continued without him. Speeders crossed overhead. Vendors called after customers. Somewhere nearby, someone was arguing loudly over a docking fee. None of it cared that Judah Lesan had been missing.
He liked that.
There was comfort in being unimportant for a few minutes.
The route came back to him more easily than expected. Familiar streets seemed to emerge from somewhere beneath the damage, each turn requiring less thought than the one before it. Judah let his feet carry him while the noise of the city moved around him, and for the first time since leaving Thyferra, he stopped wondering where he was supposed to go next.
He already knew.
Malcoma.
During his imprisonment, there had been moments when Judah could no longer tell what was real. Srina had been too good at that. Pain was simple enough to understand, but the mind was another matter. Memories could be twisted. Fear could be dressed in familiar faces. Dreams could become convincing enough that waking offered no immediate relief. There had been times when Judah had questioned pieces of his own life because something had been pushed into his head often enough, or pulled apart so thoroughly, that certainty became something he could no longer take for granted.
Mal had been different.
When things became too loud inside his own mind, Judah had gone looking for her there. Not some perfect version of her. That would have been too easy to recognize as fantasy. He remembered the way she looked at him when she knew he was about to say something stupid. He remembered the particular irritation that crossed her face when his charm failed to accomplish whatever he had clearly expected it to accomplish. He remembered her laugh, her temper, the sharpness in her voice, and the way she could make affection sound suspiciously like a threat when Judah had earned one.
Those memories had edges.
They felt real.
When Srina's games made Judah question whether something had happened the way he remembered it, he would retreat toward details no one else would have thought important enough to manufacture. The conversations that had gone nowhere. Arguments that had never really been arguments. Small looks exchanged across rooms. Moments that would have meant nothing to anyone else and somehow came to mean everything when the walls closed in.
Malcoma became somewhere the Sith could not easily follow.
Judah had never told her that, of course. He was not entirely certain how someone explained that another person had become a refuge inside their head without making the whole thing sound considerably more dramatic than he wanted it to. There had been nights when remembering her had been the only thing that interrupted whatever Srina was trying to make him see. Other times he had simply held onto the certainty that Malcoma existed somewhere beyond those walls, stubbornly and unapologetically herself, and that had been enough to remind Judah that there was still a world beyond his captor.
Thyferra had sent him looking for that certainty again.
The artifact taking the Force from him had been terrifying, but the things surrounding it had unsettled Judah in ways pain could not account for. His mind was already full of missing pieces, and the battle had added new ones before he had even begun sorting through the old. Lorn. Mercy. Srina. The metal wrapped around him. His mouth sewn shut. Jedi and Sith tearing into each other while Judah tried to understand what had happened to the lines he once thought were so clear. Even now, some of it felt too close to the tricks of captivity, reality arriving in fragments while his mind struggled to decide what belonged where.
So he had come home.
And he had gone looking for Malcoma.
The realization made the concern that had been following him since Thyferra harder to ignore. Remembering her had gotten Judah through the worst parts of his imprisonment, but memories could not tell him what had happened while he was gone. More than a year had disappeared from his life. Malcoma had lived every one of those days without him, and Judah knew almost nothing about them.
He did not know whether she had been safe.
He did not know whether she had needed him.
He did not even know what she knew about his disappearance.
That uncertainty followed Judah the rest of the way, growing heavier as the distance disappeared. He found himself studying familiar landmarks as though they might offer some warning about what waited ahead, but nothing did. The city remained stubbornly ordinary around him while the person whose memory had helped keep him sane became less of a memory with every step.
By the time Judah reached the building, his pace had slowed.
He stopped outside the door and stared at it for several seconds. For more than a year, Judah had been able to find Malcoma whenever he needed her simply by closing his eyes and reaching for something Srina had not managed to take from him. The woman on the other side of this door, if she was there at all, was not protected by memory. She had lived while he was gone. Things had happened to her that Judah did not know about, and whatever came next would be real in a way the refuge inside his head never had to be.
Oddly, that frightened him more.
Judah drew a slow breath. His hand rose toward the door, hesitated only briefly, and knocked.
