Lio wasn't expecting the touch. She definitely wasn't expecting it to be that gentle.
Vulnerability surfaced before she could stop it. She almost turned away, almost. The flinch happened before she could decide not to, a small involuntary thing, and then her eyes were watering and there was nothing she could do about it. She ran the back of her sleeve across her face.
Once. Twice.
There was too much in her head. Everything tried to move at once and nothing went anywhere.
So her body made the decision for her.
She turned. And she put her arms around Mia, not a soldier's grip, not the careful contact of someone who has learned to keep people at a measured distance. The real thing. The kind of embrace she had only ever given Mom or Ma, the kind that didn't have any performance left in it.
She held on for a moment.
Then she pulled back and shoved Mia with the heel of her palm against her shoulder. Not hard. Hard enough.
"You could've bloody led with that," she managed,
"instead of just, dumping me off with Adelle like I was some Blackwing-Rakghoul infected dar'jeti."
She sat back. Wiped her face with her sleeve again, less effective the second time. The tears were doing what they wanted now regardless.
Lio hadn't missed the other part. The light and the dark.
She sat with it, turning it over. Didn't know what to do with it.
She had been told once that only a Sith dealt in absolutes, and they did, completely, that much she believed. But the Jedi held a line for a reason. Where the Sith had been, darkness followed, and the two were almost always tied together in ways that didn't come apart cleanly no matter how hard you pulled. That was not paranoia. That was history. She had read enough of it to know.
And yet.
A Warmaster did what a Warmaster had to do. Was that it? Making use of the tools available? Or was it something else, something more deliberate, more chosen. Because one had to choose to reach toward the dark, hadn't they? It didn't just happen. You had to extend your hand.
Lio wasn't sure she could properly sit with that part of what Mia had said. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.
She stared out at the horizon where the last of the light was going. The city below had its own glow now, separate from the sun, making its own version of warmth against the dark.
She didn't say any of this out loud. She just sat with it, the way she sat with most things that didn't have clean answers, quietly, at the edge of something high, letting the feeling exist without yet deciding what to call it.
Liorra
