Private Boiling Point

[Jem Fossk]

The stolen ship descended past the smoke that billowed from down below. Coruscant remained in disarray, the destruction still smoldering faintly in places. Jem disembarked numbly. She didn't feel the cold touch of metal under her bare foot. It had been days but it looked as if nothing had changed.

Everything felt different. Everything she knew was now... different.

She was the daughter of a sith lord. No-- the daughter of her own sworn enemy. He visited her. She spoke to him. What did that make her? She had hopes of keeping the truth locked away, but Master Aeris and Master Dagon were both there when Saan'an confessed it. She shouldn't have ran like that. She shouldn't have left him behind.

She couldn't begin to think the ways this truth would destroy the last bits of her home she had left, but the fear was there... deep inside her chest. Could they even trust her?

Could she trust herself?


Jem's whole world felt irreconcilable. It was hard to hate the man that had done this. It was hard to forgive herself for what she felt. He was a monster, but... he was also her father. She walked, numb and detached through the temple's court yard. She didn't know about the safe houses that had been erupted in her absence. She didn't know the jedi were underground.

She only knew that it was time to face her home again. The force called her here.


Dagon Kaze

 

[Dagon Kaze]

In the days since Jem's flight and Saan'an's confession, Dagon's days were spent ruminating in concern over his apprentice. Instincts and impulse tugged at him to go after her, find her and bring her back but a mind cooled with experience and a heart trusting her to make the right decision and return kept him on Coruscant. No matter how hopeless and fickle, he'd learned, trust to be - mostly due to recent events- the patience and belief did, after all, pay off.

Jem returns. A hefty burden straining her shoulders into a slump, despite all the effort to keep it unseen to the outside. He sees it because he's seen it before. In the mirror. Every day. The cursed spirit of his father that had plagued him for too long, the damned fate of his twin brother that still remains unresolved. Family was a boon to Yula, no matter the struggles the Perls had gone through, but to Dagon... his had been an inescapable nightmare.

"Took you long enough." he murmurs gently with a thin smile on his face as he materializes from behind a half-collapsed column. There's still nothing too different about him than the last she saw him. Ragged, fatigued, living on anti-sleep pills to keep up with the rehabilitation efforts on Coruscant. He'd probably have been dead from exertion if it hadn't been for Yula's intervention for a breather. "Think we need to talk, Jem."

Jem Fossk

 

[Kyra Perl]

.

 

[Jem Fossk]

Jem swallowed hard.

He looked rough. Guilt nipped at her heels as she tailed alongside him. She hadn't considered what she had left people to handle alone when she fled like that. The weight of responsibility compounded with each step around the rubble they took. It all felt different now that she knew the person responsible. She could have striked him down. She should have.

The dead jedi's saber weighed heavy in her hand. She held it up wordlessly, handing over the weapon she had not earned and now did not deserve.

"Are we not... going home then?" A single look up the temple steps said it all, their path leading another way. She expected it, she guessed. She expected a lot of horrible things.

The pinch of fear she had been harboring grew tighter, her muscles coiling around the tangible emotion.

 

[Dagon Kaze]

He stares at the offered hilt, briefly lost in thought. Maybe eons ago, in another time, another master would've taken it. Among the New Jedi these old, rigid dogmas had loosened; only one glance at their outfits and their manners told you so. Unfolding his arms, Dag pushes softly her hand back, "Keep it - you're going to need in the days to come."

And then, he follows her glance up at the ruins of their home. A sight he had never expected to ever see but here they were. On the precipice. Staring at what remained, he shook his head as if to repress all the blissful memories the New Jedi had shared within the temple from emerging.

"We are... just not here." he squints, then averts his gaze back to his wayward apprentice, "The Prosperity's going to be your new home from now on, Jem. I'll take you with me to Denon later." the temple may have but all been abandoned, but Coruscant was not. It was under the safe watch of one of the few men in the galaxy he could trust - Black Mynock .

"Come." he gestures for her to follow. It's a long walk to the spaceport. Long enough for them to talk.

Because they had a lot to talk about.

"You went to him, didn't you?" Dag asks directly, his investigative flair not lost upon him and neither was his own experience with a family cursed by the Dark Side.

Jem Fossk

 

[Jem Fossk]

Her steps faltered, hot adrenaline flashing through her veins. Or was that stomach acid?

Her fingers tightened on the saber, the direction of their walk growing more disconcerting by the moment. She expected backlash, but in one sentence Dagon had exposed her like a book. Her position in the order was feeling more than precarious. For a moment, she questioned if she and her brother were safe.

"I am jedi," she protested, with helpless insistence. "I don't want to be anything else-- I am loyal to the order." The defensive response was all she could muster. Her whole body was hot. Like her own cells were attacking her inside. That's what it felt like, to have everything you know suddenly question who you are.

He would never understand.

"I didn't ask for this."

 

[Dagon Kaze]

"Neither did I, Jem." he replies softly, briefly reminiscing his own struggles with a Sith Lord father and brother. "We're rarely asked; most times we just have to play with the cards we're dealt with. As bad as the hand is, there's always a right card to play."

"...and you did just that. Coming back here." he says, turning his eyes back on her, "This is your family, Jem."

Pausing, Dag searches for his next words, "Look...you'll need to tell me what happened between you and him."

"Everything." he adds with both caution and assertion.

Jem Fossk

 

[Jem Fossk]

Jem faltered, her lack of rebuff confirming the suspicion he pressed. Uncertainty gripped at her gut. She had never felt it like this before, life had never given her a reason to.

"Family," she rebuffed, soft words full of pain. That concept had been turned on its head today. Even if she had come back, it was an action filled with doubt and fear.

"None of you know what that word means. Some days I'm not even sure you're my master. You never train me-- you always try to send me away. Either you don't think I'm good enough or you're scared of me."

The words Aeris Lashiec had used were scared for her, but her insecurities put their own wicked twist on it. Her eyes rimmed red with tears that she would not let fall. Of all the questions she now had about herself, only two were meant for Dagon.

"Do you have any faith in me? Do you even want to be here?"

 

[Dagon Kaze]

She's probably right. Maybe they, or at least he doesn't know what family means. Yula Perl has all but implicitly remarked the same in the past. From his blood, Haytham, Aeric, he's only known anguish. The Jedi are the closest thing he's got to a family. But those are not the words that puncture his heart like a hundred daggers.

It's what Jem says after that makes him stop. He swallows hard before he turns around to face her, noticing the tears that swell up in her eyes.

"Jem... where'd you get all this from?" Dag asks, hand dropping on her shoulder as he slightly leans in to match her height, "I'm not scared of you... I'm scared of myself. That I'll fail you like I did my brother and lose you. Blood doesn't shape you, you're not your father and I'll give my life before I let that happen-- it's just, I-- look, I've never been taught much myself, most of us here have been self-taught for the most part and this mentoring thing's a whole new deal for me."

"It's exactly because I have faith in you that urged me to do this, take you under my wing and all that. Because I have faith you can be a better Jedi than I ever could be."

Jem Fossk

 

[Jem Fossk]

The sharp edges of her expression all melted away-- her eyes crumping to sorrow and her cheeks drooping like a punctured balloon. She would have done anything to pry those words from him before, approval from jedi like him meant everything.

Now it felt hallow. She felt like a farce. Her shoulders slumped under his hands, weighed down and limp as the fight left her.

"My father-" she started, her voice small and fragile. She swallowed hard and looked up, finding strength in the compassion in Dagon's eyes. He was a jedi. They were jedi. Fears and lies were not their way. She push passed it all with a leap of trust.

"He has plans. He- He wants to tear the galaxy apart. Piece by piece. And I don't think he meant it like how you say pretty things in books. There will be more annihilations. Hundreds, if he gets his way. All cause-- all cause--"

She couldn't get air into her lungs. She couldn't breathe. She gripped at his arm, trying to keep herself stable as she uttered three devastating words.

"Cause of me."

She heaved in a raspy breath, her fingers digging into his arm as she fought to keep herself together.

"I need to stop him. I don't know how. Yougottahelpme."

 

[Dagon Kaze]

Her pain, her sorrow - it felt like he was looking at the mirror. As much as blood did not shape you, it was always too close to the heart to be ignored, that much he knew from his own troubles with his father. While Dag still carries a candle of hope for his brother, he knows his father is forever lost, beyond redemption. Much like Fossk. To keep false hopes was a near certain path to far more anguish. She has to know the truth even if it hurts like a schutta. He cannot lose Jem like he's lost his brother.

The soft features of compassion marking his face abate, replaced by a frown at the sound of footsteps. Commuters. Few, rare, and far in between but Dag's learned the hard way that even walls have ears.

"Come." he beckons before he lifts off in a force-enhanced leap on top of a two-story building nearby.

"Jem, I know I can't ask you just to disregard it, meditate through it, or anything corny like that... I know it won't help but--" he says assertively, "--your father, he's... gone. That man--thing-- is no longer Kaigann. Whatever he's told you, this whole... destroying the galaxy because of you - it's, it's just a way to try to scoop you in, and he's not going to stop until he's got you."

A long-drawn sigh escapes through his nostrils as he continues, "I can train you, prepare you, only as much but in the end... in the end, that is a battle only you and you only can win..." the shadows dropping over his face vanish, "...but that doesn't mean you're alone, Jem."

He recalls that cursed day on Ossus when his father, through his brother, had told him that alone he was stronger.

He was wrong.

"Trust your friends, your bonds, let those give you strength. That is something your fa-- Solipsis... does not have."​

Jem Fossk

 

[Jem Fossk]

A week ago the world had felt open for Jem. Now it was all she could do to stop her knees from clanking. A wind chilled her to her bones as she cast a glace of her home. The towering structure already felt smaller. Maybe it was her vantage point, or maybe it was the fear.

She never thought she was afraid of much. She was so wrong.

She nodded numbly at Dagon's words. She didn't believe them, but she wanted to. She felt like the only person in the whole galaxy that could ever understand the despair of her position, but Dagon said she wasn't alone so she agreed. They were in it together.

She took a step towards him and away from the terror that rooted her down. Her father had unconsciously taught her his first valuable lesson. There was always a choice.

"What's on Denon?" She inquired, voice small as she fell instep at Dagon's side.

 

[Dagon Kaze]

He lets the silence drown them both, hoping she soaks in his words. Only time would tell. If Dag can end Solipsis' reign, even with the cost of his own life, he'd do it not only for the galaxy anymore but for this young girl he called an apprentice. To rid her of the same fate he's suffered. In some odd way, this protectiveness reminds him of days so long ago when he'd twisted his ankle so bad he couldn't walk that his own brother carried him home through the predatory wildlands of Ruusan. They had been of the fickle age of ten.

"What's on Denon?" She inquired, voice small as she fell instep at Dagon's side.

"Uh, a lotta bad guys doing bad things, a lotta bad guys acting like they're the good guys and uh-- Yula's cooking." he summarizes, tapping his finger on his chin. "You'd never guess how tasty her cookin' is, like with all that tibanna stains on her clothes and whatnot." ​

Jem Fossk