Unlocked

I wake into the storm, already falling.

Wind is not wind here; it is a howl inside my skull, a pressure wave that beats against bone and lekku-stump in the same rhythm as my heart. Ozone slicks my tongue. Heat breathes against my cheek like a beast that wants to swallow. I try to speak: nothing. The old silence clamps down, the one that came after, the one I never stop carrying. Later, my mother will press a tiny droid into my hand to speak for me. But this is the moment before “later,” and my mouth makes shapes the air refuses to hold.

I am on my knees before I know I’ve bent. Dust hangs in strings of light. Each grain is a sun; each breath, a solar wind. I cup my remaining hand and catch the dark that’s leaving me. It seeps between my fingers with too much warmth.

Stop.
Not a word: An order.

Soresu taught me to make circles when the world turned into knives: contain, absorb, redirect, endure. I draw a circle with what remains of me, not on the ground but inside my blood. The technique hums in the old corners of training: elbows close, center compact, mind wider than the blade.

I press the Force through the map of myself. The body is a city I know by touch: avenues of artery, alleys of vein, crossroads where pulse shouts for attention. I go street by street. Close this. Narrow that. I pinch down a leaking branch at the hip with an invisible clamp; I braid pressure around a torn conduit along my side until the drumbeat of loss slows, then steadies. Every closure is a door I hold shut with my whole mind.

There is pain… But the Force makes room around it, the way one makes room around a frightened eopie so it won’t kick. I build bridges of calm from organ to organ, lay them gently over flaring nerves. The world blurs to a bead of sweat traveling along my temple. I follow it because I can follow only one thing.

Count.
Not numbers: Breaths.

In. I find the nearest arterial spray and turn it to mist, then to nothing.
Out. I hitch a broken rhythm back into the beat of a living drum.
In. I feel the delicate vessels that feed the stump of my lekku fluttering like torn banners. I smooth them; I stitch them down with warmth that is mine and not mine, patient as a tide.
Out. I gather all the free-floating iron-taste and tell it to return home, to unspill, to remember its route.

My hand had become a mantra. I do not look at what hurt me. I do not look at the horizon that keeps tilting. I stare into the bowl of my palm as if the galaxy were small enough to cradle.

When the urge to fall into sleep hits, I build one more circle. A tiny sun in my belly. I feed it one steady breath, then another. It glows. It answers me. It keeps me awake.

A shadow crawls at the edges of vision… Memory or mercy, I can’t tell. Somewhere, a hinge clicks. Somewhere, a blade hums. I leave those sounds alone. I leave everything alone that is not blood sealing and life staying and the quiet certainty that if I keep this up for ten more breaths, then twenty, then two hundred, I will rise again and carry what I must.

Later, I will learn to move inside that same circle with metal grafted to bone, the curve of a defensive form traced by limbs that never tire. Later still, Younglings will watch as I breathe one… two… three… and make serenity out of noise. But here and now I press one last ruptured thread closed and feel, with a relief so fierce it is almost joy, the flow turns inward, as if a river decided to keep its own secrets.

Darkness comes on like rain finally ending.

Shakka’Dira jolted awake, breath rasping against the silence she had long ago made peace with. She lay still, counting the beats until her pulse matched the quiet hum of the room. A tear slid from the corner of her working eye; she wiped it away with the heel of her palm and reached for the small switch. Light bled up the wall, soft and domestic, a mercy against the dream’s serrated edges.

She folded her legs beneath her. Back straight. Shoulders drifting down with the exhale. The habit of centering had been Aayla’s gift as much as any lesson with a saber: pause, breathe, let the mind unclench until choice returns. Shakka let the breath empty her, let it fill her; the room expanded. The old calm ebbed at her feet.

The door burst inward.

She didn’t think. The Force echoed the nightmare’s urgency. Only this time there was no blood, only movement. Her folded lightsaber leapt from the nightstand to her palm; one flick and the hinge unlocked, the spine uncoiling with a familiar click as a blade shot to either side. Green and blue bathed the walls, and her silhouette tightened into Soresu’s cradle: elbows in, guard knit close, the temperament of a storm that does not move.

The figure at the threshold froze, hands up, eyes wide in the universal plea of don’t. “The- The door was unlocked,” she stuttered, voice catching on her own shock.

Shakka blinked, the glare of light on metal easing as her focus narrowed. It was the woman from the streets, the Twi’lek she’d passed at dusk. The one whose gaze had held too much confidence to look away from. Not because of pity. Shakka had felt enough of that traveling the galaxy with cybernetics that gleamed whether she wished it or not. No, this stranger’s eyes read her as if prosthetics were only a dialect.

The double blades hissed closed. Her stance softened but did not fall; an innocent civilian was no threat, unless someone waited just out of sight with a crueler plan. Shakka flicked her attention down the hall and then back to the woman when it was safe.

“Y-You’re… a Jedi.” The words were almost a whisper. Her lekku twitched, embarrassment and awe tangled together. “Jedi are rare these days.” A swallow. “No wonder you wear normal clothes.”

Shakka dipped her chin. The room’s ordinary light found the edges of fear and filed them flat. With a small motion she invited the woman in. The door sighed shut behind them.

The ice didn’t stand a chance. Names grew out of small talk, as they always did. Yone Duri. A life spent answering to the next highest bidder; a childhood of rooms that never felt like hers. She promised hurriedly and earnestly to tell no one what she had seen tonight. Shakka nodded her thanks.

Her lekku traced a gentler cadence. She remembered the warmth of Aayla’s regard at the start of every lesson, the way that kind gaze had taught her to take up space without apology. She remembered Deet’s patient humor, the cove of trinkets, the first time she’d understood that repairs could be a kind of love. A kind of love. Something small and bright lit behind her ribs. It scared her and steadied her in the same breath.

They talked. The hours put down roots. Yone’s shy smile tilted toward the window whenever the conversation went quiet. She was easy to be with, in a way that loneliness makes rare. Shakka listened, then answered without filters she normally kept welded in place. She told the truth of it: the faithful service, the running, the tiredness that never quite left her shoulders. Yone offered the truth back, coin for coin, a life of being owned and now a life of not belonging anywhere you weren’t paying for.

Something in Shakka unclasped. She was tired of always defending, even in rooms that were safe. Tonight, the circle could widen.

She reached out, laid her organic hand, scar-laced and steady, on Yone’s thigh. Her lekku shifted with a language that had never needed sound. Stay, they said. Stay and let this be a place that is ours.

“Don’t leave tonight. Stay with me.” The words lived in her eyes and the tendons of her wrist and the warm weight of her palm. Yone understood; of course she did. She leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to Shakka’s cheek, soft and pure. Shakka couldn’t laugh, not the way she used to, but her lekku rippled with laughter anyway, a thousand untranslatable expressions poured graceful and bright into the air between them, understood perfectly by the only other Twi’lek in the room.