Private The Sal-Soren Problem

[Bastila Sal-Soren]

D'Qar had never been her favourite place. Not that the Vanguard had even used it much. She put it down to the noise.

Even here in a top secret base it was loud and constant. She was buried within the medical wing and far from the constant movement of hangars and command posts, yet still there was always something. The low drone of ventilation or the distant thrum of the generators. Even footsteps passing beyond half-closed doors made themselves so very heard.

And beneath it all, the steady mechanical pulse of the bacta tank made sure that she would never forget where they were, or why they were here.

Bastila had been told where Lorn was almost as soon as she arrived, she hadn’t even taken two steps off the shuttle when one of the deck crew pulled her aside and told her what had happened. She had chosen not to go to him. Not yet.

Instead she had gone looking for her sister.

There was something almost cowardly about that, she supposed as she moved through the base. Lorn was injured, maybe even badly enough that someone had decided immersion was preferable to anything less drastic, and every instinct drilled into Bastila over years told her that her first concern should have been her Master.

But Lorn was alive, she could feel it on the edges of her consciousness. Yet as she had gone she reminded herself that Brandyn was alive too. Somehow that frightened her.

She found her sister ironically in the last place she had gone looking for her. Stood before the Bacta tank that housed the beaten body of her Master. Bastila had slowed when she saw him, his form floating in suspension like a shard of heavy wood in water. Her eyes lingered on him for half a heartbeat, her mind racing of the path that may have just been stripped from under her before approaching. She offered no grin this time, not even a clever little comment to announce herself. Her hands disappeared into the pockets of her jacket instead.

"Bri. Thank the Force you are okay." Her eyes flicked briefly towards Lorn and then back to her sister. Who she instead rushed, threw two arms around and held for just long enough for it to be considered enough.

"I need to talk to you." Bastila's mouth tightened as she released herself from around Briana. She glanced down the corridor, checking that they were alone before continuing in a quieter voice. "It's about Brandyn."

She exhaled through her nose and tried not to look back towards Lorn, her heart sinking at just how beaten up he was.

"I was with him on Thyferra.” Bastila didn't smile at the thought. "Something's wrong with him, Briana."

For a moment Bastila was quiet.

"He looked at me like..." She stopped herself and whatever comparison had come to mind, she clearly decided against giving it life. "I don't know."

That admission seemed to irritate her more than anything else. Bastila pushed away from the wall, folding her arms across herself.

"I need you to tell me I'm imagining it Briana." Her expression said plainly that she didn't believe she was, even as she looked back at Lorn in the Bacta tube. "Because I'm starting to think our brother is in trouble, and we don’t need to lose more than we already have."

OUTFIT: XoXo | TAG: Briana Sal-Soren Referencing: Lorn Reingard Brandyn Sal-Soren EQUIPMENT:

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[Briana Sal-Soren]

Briana thought, as she watched Lorn unconscious and suspended in his bacta tank, that she should have been accustomed to all of this by now, to the aftermath of any large-scale battle and the tolls it took. The fight against the Sith went back to her Padawan days, after all. They could wear different colors, crown different Emperors, but they were all followers of the Dark Side just the same, and they were only becoming bolder as the years went on. Was the galaxy just growing darker, giving them more room to act? Or were they simply not doing enough as a whole? What was it going to take to finally bring it to an end?

How many more of her friends and family would she have to watch throw themselves into the meatgrinder trying to figure it out? She'd thought the Vanguard was the answer, but after all they'd lost, there was no telling how long it would take before they recovered from Thyferra and could act again.

"Bri. Thank the Force you are okay."

She turned toward the interruption of her private thoughts, towards her sisters familiar voice, the datapad of Lorn's vitals held aloft in her hands. The immediate read on Bastila's face made a pang of guilt shoot through her, and she quickly deposited the device onto the nearest medical table, to make sure she could catch her sister rushing into her. Her arms settled tightly around the youngest of the Sal-Soren brood, allowing herself, for those few precious seconds, to hold her. One hand settled protectively against the back of her head, stroking her fingers through her hair as their mother used to do. Bastila, who should have been somewhere laughing with friends, worrying over menial Jedi assignments or whatever other trivial disasters came off the cusp of young adulthood. Instead she was here, witnessing one more horror, one more indignity to add to the pile.

"Yeah," Briana sighed against the crown of her head, her brows drawing together when she felt the subtle shift in Bastila's posture. "I'm okay." Barely a moment later, Bastila was pulling away. At this distance, it was easy to catch sight of the bruise darkening her sister's cheek, and whatever relief she'd felt at seeing her upright and whole immediately soured. Her hand came up instinctively, fingers catching gently beneath Bastila's chin and turning her face toward the light so she could get a better look. "What happened to your face?" she asked, even as Bastila began rapid firing her concerns about Brandyn.

For several long seconds she was quiet, then slipped an arm around Bastila's shoulders and gently steered her back toward the door. "Come on," she said softly. "We'll talk, but not here." There was no reason to keep her in a place like this any longer than necessary.

Once the doors to the medical ward sealed behind them, Briana leaned back against the nearest wall. She wasn't particularly concerned about being interrupted, or overheard out here. There were too few of them left to worry about anyone wandering down these particular corridors anytime soon, not without reason anyways.

Folding her arms across her chest, she fixed Bastila with a level look, trying to decide what to say and where to start.

Did she tell Bastila that she'd caught Brandyn half out of his mind and torturing someone, again? That she'd handled it in the worst way possible, throwing him across the room and leveling a lightsaber at his face because she'd been terrified of watching him kill another person on her watch, of letting the same mistakes and consequences that'd defined the last few years begin all over again?

Did she tell her what she'd felt on Thyferra? How Brandyn took all of that pain inside him and shoved it through their bond until she'd been choking on it too? How she'd turned around and fed it into her own fight, weaponizing something that wasn't even hers because she hadn't known what else to do with it? Her eyes briefly looked down at her one real hand, where the crescent marks from her nails were still healing after Brandyn invaded her head.

She knew her failure to give her any sort of immediate reassurance would likely send her into more of a spiral, but she wasn't about to lie to her face, either - despite every instinct in her telling her to do exactly that, to protect her.

"I wish I could tell you that," Briana said, sympathy softening her expression. "But I don't know. Brandyn's letting himself be consumed by Gianna's disappearance and he's not acting like himself." She paused, briefly looking away. "He called me out to an old New Way base on Janara III. Started talking about Dad, about everything that happened..." Her mouth tightened. "He was barely making sense half the time and I could tell he hadn't slept properly in days. Maybe weeks. I don't know for sure. We got into it and things got heated, then the call came through from Lorn about Thyferra, and the rest was left unresolved."

Her eyes moved back to Bastila's face, lingering on the bruise darkening her cheek as a sick feeling settled into the pit of her stomach. "What happened between you two on that battlefield, Bast?" she asked, quieter now. "I felt Brandyn." Her brows drew together. "Whatever was happening to him, whatever he was feeling... it was bad enough that he shoved all of it into me from halfway across those bacta fields." Her gaze returned pointedly to Bastila's cheek.

"Did he do that?"

TAG: Bastila Sal-Soren

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[Bastila Sal-Soren]

"No." Bastila's hand rose to her cheek almost reflexively, fingertips brushing against the discolouration as if she'd forgotten it was there until Briana pointed it out. For the briefest moment she looked confused, then understanding dawned. "I mean yes, no; no, Bri. Brandyn didn't do this. He didn’t mean to I know he didn’t."

There was an edge to the correction. Something strangely protective, yet at the same time as if a great swelling of emotion had suddenly filled every part of her face.

"He didn't hit me." Her hand dropped. "It was some Sith did. Or a soldier. Maybe a tree." A faint shrug followed, the closest Bastila managed to humour in an attempt to stop the tears that were forming under her eyes from spilling forth. "There were a lot of things trying to kill me that day."

Normally she might have made more of it. A grin, perhaps. Some ridiculous embellishment about heroically fighting the tree but nothing came. How does one tell someone that everything you held honourable in your heart had been killed in one swift action?

Instead Bastila looked back towards the sealed doors. Lorn remained on the other side, suspended in bacta while the machines did what none of them could. She stared for a few seconds before lowering her voice.

"There was a Sith there." Bastila swallowed. "Brandyn found her or she found us, I don’t really know which."

That was where it became harder. She folded her arms, not defensively but tightly, hands disappearing beneath her elbows as if she was holding it all in, desperate to not let it go.

"I don't know what you felt from him, Bri. I was right there and I'm still not sure I understand it." Her eyes lowered. "He had her. She was beaten. Whatever fight there had been between them was over." Bastila's jaw tightened. "And he wouldn't stop."

She could still see it. Brandyn's hands around that Sith. The hatred in him pouring out of him, Bastila pulling at him, trying to make him hear her.

"I told him we needed her alive. She said she knew where Gianna was. I told him killing her wasn't going to bring Gianna back."

"He didn’t listen…" The words were quieter than everything that had preceded them.

Bastila finally looked at Briana again. "I've seen Brandyn angry. I've seen him hurt. Force knows, I've spent most of my life deliberately causing the first one." A little ghost of something crossed her expression, "But that wasn't Brandyn losing his temper."

Her brow furrowed, her expression not directed towards her sister as she tried to recollect those moments.

"I saw a monster that had found a way out at last."

Perhaps it was she who was exaggerating and the distinction shouldn't have mattered. The Sith had hurt Brandyn, tormented him, taken his daughter. Bastila could think of a hundred arguments for why the galaxy was better without her in it.

None of them made what she had watched feel right.

"You're telling me he was like this before Thyferra? That he called you to some abandoned New Way base talking about Dad. That he hasn't been sleeping. That he's been putting whatever is inside his head into yours."

She stopped.

"Bri..." For once, the youngest Sal-Soren looked every bit her age. "I think we really should start asking ourselves what is happening to our brother?"

OUTFIT: XoXo | TAG: Briana Sal-Soren | Brandyn Sal-Soren EQUIPMENT:

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