[ THE ARCHEOLOGIST ]
Wearing: xxx
Tag:
Hollis Orenn
Justice Lesan had always found ruins easier to understand than people.
Ruins could conceal the truth beneath centuries of dust, collapsed stone, mineral growth, and the violence of history, but they rarely lied. A fracture through old masonry could reveal the direction of an impact. Carbon scoring could preserve the memory of a battle long after everyone involved had turned to dust. A broken vessel could tell him who had lived somewhere, what they valued, who they traded with, and sometimes what they feared. Justice only needed patience, time, and a willingness to keep digging until the story began to make sense.
People were considerably less cooperative.
That thought followed him as he crossed the threshold of the Lesan home on Naboo. The house recognized him almost immediately, bringing the interior lighting up gradually while the evening beyond the windows settled into the deep blues and purples that came after sunset. The air outside still carried the softness of Naboo, warm and clean compared to the dry excavation site he had left behind. Justice set his travel case near the entry and looked down at the faint layer of dust clinging to it before deciding that Hollis would probably prefer he not drag any more of the dig into the house than he already had.
Normally, coming home from an excavation quieted something in him almost immediately. Naboo had become familiar in the way that mattered most. The house held Hollis, the twins, and the life they had built together far away from ancient tombs, forgotten temples, and the endless evidence that civilizations were remarkably talented at destroying themselves. Justice could usually leave all of that at the door.
Tonight, the weight followed him inside.
The first reports from Thyferra had reached the expedition team before his transport departed. The Sith had invaded. Alazhi fields were burning. Processing facilities had come under attack. Civilian and military casualty figures shifted from one transmission to the next, while every news service seemed desperate to publish something before anyone could verify whether it was true.
Justice had approached the situation the same way he approached almost everything else. He collected information, separated confirmed facts from speculation, compared reports, and refused to let the urgency of the broadcasts dictate what he believed. That method had served him well as an archeologist and even better as a Jedi Consular. The loudest explanation was rarely the most accurate one.
Then he had seen Judah's name.
The first mention had been easy to dismiss. The second had been more difficult. By the third, Justice had stopped pretending that he was reading the reports with any academic detachment.
Judah Lesan had been seen alive on Thyferra.
The claims were inconsistent enough that Justice should have remained skeptical. One report claimed his uncle had escaped Sith imprisonment. Another insisted Judah had been held by the Sith Empress herself. Several witnesses placed a Jedi matching his description near one of the refinery complexes during the invasion. The recordings that circulated afterward were grainy, distant, and nearly useless.
Justice had watched them anyway.
He had watched them several times.
His prosthetic hand flexed as he stood quietly in the entryway. The movement was subtle and almost unconscious, but the sensation that followed was not. Pain crawled through fingers that had not existed for years and settled into a palm that was no longer there. Justice knew exactly what caused it. His brain retained the memory of nerves, muscles, and sensation that the rest of his body could no longer provide. He understood the medical explanation well enough to teach it to someone else if he had to.
Understanding the reason never made the pain less convincing.
Justice rotated his prosthetic wrist slowly and waited for the sensation to pass. He had learned not to fight it. Resistance rarely accomplished anything except making him more aware of something he could not change.
The discomfort eventually faded enough for him to move deeper into the house.
Judah would have hated the amount of analysis Justice had already subjected the reports to. His uncle had always possessed a particular Corellian talent for deciding that hesitation was merely another obstacle best overcome by accelerating directly through it. Judah could walk into a disaster with a crooked grin and somehow make recklessness look like confidence.
Justice had never been built that way.
He had spent most of his life preferring libraries to battlefields and excavation trenches to war rooms. The Force had not revealed itself through some dramatic childhood display that left everyone certain he was destined to become a great Jedi. Justice had grown into his connection with it slowly, and the power had come later than many expected. Even when that strength finally developed, he never saw combat as the purpose of it.
Justice learned to fight because eventually knowledge required defending.
He learned to survive because the galaxy repeatedly placed him in situations where intelligence alone was not enough.
He became dangerous because circumstances demanded that he become capable of protecting the things he valued.
Those things were here.
Justice could feel Hollis somewhere deeper in the house before he heard her milling about. Her presence had become so familiar that he did not need to deliberately reach through the Force to identify it. Years together had woven Hollis into the rhythms of his life so completely that home had stopped being a place long ago. Naboo was beautiful, and Justice had come to love the peaceful landscape surrounding them, but the planet itself was not what made returning matter.
Hollis did.
The twins did.
Justice loved all three of them with a completeness that still surprised the scholar in him because there was nothing particularly rational about it. He could spend weeks carefully reconstructing the purpose of an artifact from fragmentary evidence, but there was no analysis required where his family was concerned. Hollis had become the certainty against which everything else in his life was measured.
That certainty made the reports about Judah more complicated.
Justice had already mourned his uncle.
There had never been a grave in the traditional sense, but Justice understood that graves were not always places where bodies rested. Sometimes people constructed them from memories because they needed somewhere to put grief that had no proper conclusion. Justice had accepted that Judah was gone because eventually there had been no other choice.
Now a handful of unreliable reports threatened to tear that acceptance apart.
Justice wanted to believe them.
That frightened him more than he wanted to admit. Hope required almost no evidence once someone wanted something badly enough. The Consular in him knew better than to trust it. The archeologist demanded proof. The Jedi insisted that emotion could not be allowed to replace judgment.
The nephew in him simply wanted his uncle to be alive.
Justice heard movement farther inside the house, and the tension in his expression eased almost immediately. He could not see Hollis yet, but he knew the rhythm of her presence well enough that a small smile touched his face before he realized it had happened.
Thyferra would still be burning in the morning. The reports would still be there. Judah would either be alive or he would not, regardless of how many times Justice reviewed the evidence tonight.
For the moment, Justice had come home.
He slipped out of his travel jacket, draped it over his arm, and followed the familiar sounds of his family deeper into the house.
"I'm home."