Private Rough Edges

[Corazona von Ascania]

The failed Summer Rain Rebellion had only taken a day, but its consequences stretched far over the following months.

A thunderous crash reverberated through Canella district. Among the ruins of burned-out houses and partially collapsed structures, a building had suddenly caved in. It wasn't so much the clatter of duracrete bricks and sharp, violent snapping of beams of wood that roused the attention of passersby. Such sounds were common in the aftermath of the assault, given that over half of the city had been destroyed.

It was the woman, trembling as she held her face and screamed in desperation.

"Help! Please-" she cried. The basket she'd been carrying and been dropped in a fit of fright, and small, round fruits rolled along the sidewalk and street, coated in dust. "Th-there are children in there! I sa...saw them before it collapsed!"

Cora hadn't looked to see if anyone else descended on the ruins of the apartment building. Bright yellow caution tape was strewn about the rubble, denoting that the structure was off limits. Like many of the damaged buildings, it was deemed unlivable and due to be demolished.

Suddenly, she whipped her head back towards the woman. "How many are there?"

"At least...two, I think. Boys. There could be more."

Cora turned back to the building. The east-facing wall was still intact, and she could see a broken window on the second floor. Gloved hands found purchase on the rough stonework, and she climbed.

Roman Vossari

 

[Roman Vossari]

Lieutenant Roman Vossari
Canella District | Ukatis
TAG: Corazona von Ascania
GEAR: X | X | X | X | X

Roman stood at the edge of what had once been a marketplace, but now resembled the carcass of a forgotten city. Smoke no longer rose, not visibly, but it clung to everything, settled into the stones, soaked into the fabric of the wind. A half-toppled clock tower lay across the square like the corpse of time itself, and the charred remnants of banners fluttered weakly from poles that had no audience anymore.

Ukatis.

He had once stood in this very square while Cora bartered for some absurd trinket, claiming it had "character." He hadn't said it then, because he never did, but he liked it here. The chaos of the galaxy always seemed to hush a little in this corner of space. People had laughed here. Children had run through these streets. The kind of peace Roman didn't think he deserved had lived here.

Now it was ash.

The sky above the Canella district was a dull, overcast gray, as if the heavens couldn't bear to look directly at the wounds below. Roman walked with measured steps, the heavy boots of a soldier moving like he was afraid to disturb the dead. Every face he passed was worn thin. Every breath the city took was through grit-stained lungs.

He kept his hood drawn, the long coat disguising the silhouette of a man built like a ghost of war. His Force signature, once steady, once burning under the steady hand of his Master, was drawn inward, locked behind walls he'd built like a bunker. He wasn't here as a Jedi. Not anymore. He wasn't here as a soldier either, not technically. This was personal.

He'd heard the stories. Everyone had. The madness in the capital, the toxin, the Sith. The Rebellion that lasted only a day, but shredded the soul of a world.

And then the rumors. A Jedi woman who'd killed her own father. A noble's daughter wielding a saber with fire in her eyes.

Cora.

He reached the ruin just as the woman began screaming. Her voice carried through the street like glass shattering in silence. Roman's head snapped toward the noise, scanning with the instincts of a man who'd lived too long in battlefields and bad decisions. The structure was on the verge of collapse, more memory than building now, and it was marked clearly as condemned. But Cora was already climbing.

"Still doing this the hard way," he muttered.

He moved fast but quiet, cutting across the rubble with long, sure strides. Civilians stepped back without thinking. There was something in his presence that suggested authority, or danger, or both. He stopped only when he reached the edge of the structure.

She was already inside.

He hesitated for only a breath. He should call out, let her know he was here. But something in him flinched, some part of him ashamed for being gone too long. For not writing. For not being there when this planet cracked open.

So he did what Roman did best. He went forward. Quietly. Precisely.

There would be time to talk later. Maybe. For now, there were children in the rubble and Cora was risking her life to save them. Some things didn't change. Not for her.

And Roman, despite it all, was still the kind of man who followed his Master into the fire.
​

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

Hairline cracks webbed across the broken, jagged glass of the window pane. Cora switched her grip, hanging from the far side of the ledge as sharp fragments fell away. Once her makeshift entrance was cleared, she lifted herself through the window.

Her boots gingerly touched the now-slanted flooring. Dust hung heavily in the air, kicked up from the collapse. Cora buried her nose and mouth into the crook of her arm with a cough.

Below her, she could hear soft, muffled cries.

"Is anyone there?" she called, pausing to clear her throat against her sleeve as she inched forward. "Keep making noise, if you can!"

The cries continued. There were two, maybe three distinct voices. Something tugged at the periphery of her mind - something familiar. It wasn't malicious, so she tucked that observation away for now.

Glowrod in hand, Cora made her way through the rubble. The unit she'd landed in was partially damaged, but the one next to it had collapsed into the two units below.

Carefully, she picked her way through a tangle of broken beams and snapped floor boards. A severed wire occasionally sparked in the darkness, giving her pause. Eventually, she came upon an obstacle she couldn't easily surmount - a snarl of wires and shattered ceiling beams. Muffled shouting emanated from within.

Cora's heart stopped, then galloped forward. She placed a hand upon one of the broken boards and let out a shuddering exhale.

"How many are there of you? Is anyone injured?"

Roman Vossari

 

[Roman Vossari]

Lieutenant Roman Vossari
Canella District | Ukatis
TAG: Corazona von Ascania
GEAR: X | X | X | X | X

The hallway groaned as Roman entered, dust cascading from the ceiling in tired little drifts. The structure had all the integrity of a lie, barely holding itself together. Every step felt like a negotiation with fate. His boots crunched over shattered glass and splintered wood. Smoke and dust curled in the glow of his wrist light.

He didn't need to follow her Force signature. He could smell the stubbornness. Same as always.

The cries were louder now. Young. Trapped. Frightened. Roman paused beside the fractured remains of a load-bearing column, placing a gloved hand on the wall to steady himself as the building gave another low, unhappy creak. He glanced up at the slanted ceiling above. The second floor looked like it had given up halfway through the collapse, now draped like a drunken curtain over the ruins below.

He heard her voice.

"How many are there of you? Is anyone injured?"

Roman didn't announce himself. He didn't need to. He just climbed, quietly, moving like a man whose bones remembered war more vividly than peace. He reached the snarl of debris just seconds after her voice cut the silence. A rusted beam blocked the path, thick with hanging wires that spat idle sparks like lazy threats.

He crouched.

"Still chasing disasters, Master?" His voice was low, rough with disuse, as if the words had to fight their way out of his chest. "You're consistent, I'll give you that."

He stepped around the beam, wedging his shoulder under one of the larger supports. His coat caught on a nail and tore, but he didn't stop. The muscles in his back pulled taut, legs braced against the ground. With a grunt and the ugly screech of metal protesting change, he shifted the beam just enough to give her clearance.

The glow of her rod caught his features briefly. Time hadn't been kind. His face had thinned, sharpened, more angles, less softness. A hard cut of jaw. Stubble. Eyes like a wolf that never really left the woods.

"Still with me?" he asked without looking at her, his voice clipped with strain. "I lift, you crawl. We trade places if it gets worse."

Below them, one of the voices cried out again. A boy. Afraid.

Roman's jaw tightened.

"We move fast," he said. "This whole building's one bad breath away from falling on its own grave."

He finally looked at her. The moment stretched, but he didn't speak.

He just gave a small nod. The kind that said we'll talk later, if we live.
​

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

Roman didn't announce himself; not directly. He was heralded by the particular way his footsteps fell against fragments of glass and slats of wood, by the way debris jostled in his path. Even as the Force coalesced into something persistent, it was her sense of hearing that told a more familiar story.

Cora didn't know that it was him until his features caught the light of the glowrod. Long, deep shadows sunk across Roman's face, casting his features into something grim. It wasn't just the way the light played; the lines of his visage formed something harder. A man who had seen much more than he'd ever been meant to.

Cora was tired. She wore her fatigue in the hollow spaces just below her eyes, in the down-turned corners of her mouth. A woman dragged down by an incredible weight. Yet, in that moment, her expression flared in surprise.

"Ro-"

She choked on his name. A sudden coughing fit was smothered in the crook of her arm. Cora never did well with dust or chance meetings.

A pang of something bittersweet struck her; Roman had changed in their time a part, but she'd seen the beginnings of it lingering in his eyes before he'd even left the Order.

Before she could gather her words, he was already working. Cora glanced to the narrow space he'd opened up, and returned his nod. No more time was wasted began crawling her way through. It came as a relief that she still felt that mutual trust. Their bond had been stretched, but it hadn't broken.

"I don't chase them," she lied, murmuring a delayed thought. "They find me."

The pair picked their way through the rubble in sync. A thousand questions whirled in her mind, and each time one managed to bubble to the surface, something happened. A jostle to the building. A snapped wire almost hitting her in the face.

Eventually, they reached the children. As Roman shouldered the remains of a stone fireplace, Cora shifted a shattered beam with steady movements of her hand to reveal a pair of terrified, soot-caked faces.

"A-are you going to get us out of here?" One asked, his voice trembling. When Cora held the glow rod closer to assess him for injuries, she saw that the dust clinging to his face had become wet with tears.

"We're going to do our best," she soothed, voice low. "Does anything hurt?"

"Our brother," the other boy croaked, pointing to the side. Blood caked beneath his fingernails. "Please get him! He's over there, I…I think."

Sure enough, a third voice could be heard wailing behind another pile of debris. This one sounded pained.

Cora shot Roman a desperate look. "Can you get these two out of here?"

Roman Vossari

 

[Roman Vossari]

Lieutenant Roman Vossari
Canella District | Ukatis
TAG: Corazona von Ascania
GEAR: X | X | X | X | X

Roman crouched low, eyes narrowing as the third voice rose from behind the next ruin of stone and timber, smaller, raw with pain, the kind of sound that sliced straight through armor. His jaw clenched so tightly it ached.

Three kids. One injured. Time bleeding out.

Cora's voice pierced the moment.

"Can you get these two out of here?"

He didn't hesitate. Just nodded once, short and sharp.

"I've got them," he said, already moving, already calculating.

He reached the two uninjured boys, one arm wrapping firmly around the smaller of the two. "Grab onto me," he said to the other. "Tight. You don't let go unless I tell you."

The boy hesitated only a second before clinging to Roman's cloak like it was the last stable thing in the galaxy. Smart kid.

Roman looked back at Cora. "If that building shifts again, you pull out. No martyr bullshit."

The threat of collapse wasn't just a possibility. The structure was talking to him now, groaning with the fatigue of standing. Roman had heard that sound before. Buildings, battalions, people. Everything made the same noise just before it fell.

He turned, shielding the boys with his body as he moved through the corridor of broken furniture and drywall. Every step was deliberate. The smaller boy buried his face in Roman's side, shaking like a leaf.

Outside. He just had to get them outside.

Roman glanced over his shoulder once, catching a final glimpse of Cora's silhouette half-swallowed by rubble. His fingers tightened on the boy's shoulder.

"I'll be back in two minutes," he muttered to no one in particular.

Because of course he would be. Because this wasn't finished. Because Cora was still in there, and some kid was still screaming. Roman didn't believe in much anymore. Not destiny. Not redemption.

But he believed in her. And for now, that would have to be enough.
​