**She scrambled.**
Not toward the cockpit's turret controls, but deeper into the ship, past the trembling younglings clutching the tooka doll. A hatch hissed open beneath a grimy floor panel. Below, cramped and reeking of coolant, lay the dorsal quad-laser turret—manual, analog, built for desperate moments. She slid into the worn harness, her fingers gripping twin firing handles. The targeting scope flickered to life, painting the V-wings as angry red blips against the debris field's corpse-gray backdrop. Outside, the Consular-class ship jinked violently as Revan threw it sideways. A proton torpedo screamed past the viewport. The inertial dampeners whined. "Hold it steady!" the Padawan yelled, her voice strained. She lined up her first shot. Breathed out. Squeezed. Green laserfire lanced out. A V-wing's port engine vanished in a silent bloom of flame.
**Revan flew like Revan remembered.**
Not elegant maneuvers, but brutal, unpredictable jags—diving into the shadow of a gutted Acclamator, skimming so close to a floating engine block that shields screamed in protest. He used the debris as a weapon. A sharp roll sent the freighter scraping along a derelict frigate's spine, shearing off sensor arrays that tumbled into the path of pursuing V-wings. One clipped the spinning metal, spiraling into oblivion. Inside the turret, the Twi'lek braced against centrifugal force, her lekku plastered to her shoulders. She tracked another fighter screaming overhead. Fired. Missed. Fired again. This time, crimson bolts ripped through its cockpit. Silence followed the explosion. Her hands trembled. Not from fear. From fury. Each V-wing burned was retribution for Temple corridors choked with smoke and youngling cries.
**Another alarm.**
The interdictor's tractor beam lanced out, a shimmering blue tendril grasping for the freighter's hull. Revan snarled—an inhuman sound through the modulator. He punched the engines into a suicidal dive *toward* the cruiser's belly, directly beneath its projector array. The beam grazed their aft shields, sending sparks showering through the turret access hatch. Debris filled the viewport: shattered bulkheads, twisted plating. "NOW!" Revan roared. The Padawan understood. She swung the turret upward, ignoring the V-wings harrying their flanks. She aimed not at fighters, but at a cluster of unstable Tibanna gas canisters magnet-locked to the cruiser's lower hull—discarded ordnance. She poured fire into them. The explosion wasn't fire. It was frozen light—an expanding sphere of azure destruction that ripped upward through the interdictor's projector housing. Gravity fluctuated wildly. The beam died. The freighter surged free as the cruiser listed, venting atmosphere into the void. Somewhere in the chaos, Revan saw V-wing engines stuttering, caught in their own ship's dying gravity. The Padawan slumped in her harness, breathing hard. One battle ended. The hunt was just beginning.
**She crawled back to the cockpit.**
Her legs shook. The acrid scent of ozone and charred circuits clung to her robes. She ignored the smoldering console warnings, ignored the younglings' wide-eyed stares from the hold hatchway. Her gaze fixed on Revan—still locked in the pilot's seat, gauntlets tight on the controls, scanning the debris field for the next threat. Without a word, she walked stiffly to the co-pilot's seat beside him. Her knees buckled. She collapsed into the worn leather, the adrenaline crash hitting her like a speeder truck. Her lekku draped limply over her shoulders. She stared blankly at the streaking stars outside, her knuckles white where she gripped the armrests. Silence stretched, thick with the echoes of blasterfire and screams. Only the freighter's steady hum and the distant thrum of hyperspace filled the void. Her shoulder—flawlessly healed—itched beneath torn fabric. A phantom pain. Or a reminder.
**Revan's helmet tilted fractionally.**
He didn't speak. His right hand moved, slow and deliberate, away from the controls. It hovered for a heartbeat beside the co-pilot's console. Then, fingers tapped a sequence. A small compartment hissed open. Inside rested a dented thermos flask—stainless steel, unadorned, utterly mundane amid the chaos. Steam curled from its spout. The scent of strong, bitter caf cut through the cockpit's tension like a vibroblade. He nudged it toward her with the back of his knuckle, the gesture jarringly human. His visor remained fixed on the swirling hyperspace vortex ahead, impassive. The caf steamed. The Padawan stared at it, then at the Mandalorian mask beside her. Legend offered terror, conquest, darkness. Not... caf. Her trembling hand reached out, wrapping around the warm metal. The heat seeped into her palms, grounding her. She took a shaky sip. Bitter. Scalding. Real. Her eyes closed.
**Silence stretched.**
Only the freighter's hum and the soft drip of water from Revan's armor broke the stillness. He shifted slightly, the servos in his left vambrace whining faintly—a remnant of Skywalker's lightning. His crimson gauntlet rested on the yoke, idle. The Twi'lek watched condensation bead on her thermos. Her reflection warped in the steel: green eyes shadowed, lekku matted with grime, a face too young for genocide. She traced the healed skin on her shoulder with her thumb. Smooth. Unblemished. Impossible. Her gaze drifted to Revan's profile—sharp angles, cold durasteel, the promise of ancient atrocities. Yet he'd blocked blasterfire with a saber in each hand. He'd torn metal apart with stolen Force. He'd given her caf. The contradiction coiled tight in her chest, sharper than any pain. *Who are you?* The question burned again. But legends didn't pour caf. Monsters didn't heal.
**Revan's modulated voice cut through the quiet, sudden and low.**
"Padawan." Not a question. A statement. He didn't turn. His fingers tapped once, absently, against the thermos flask still resting near her thigh. Steam ghosted between them. "You never told me your name." The words were flat, stripped of Revan's gravitas or menace. Utterly ordinary. Almost conversational. Yet beneath the distortion, something bled through—weariness, perhaps. Or a frayed edge of something dangerously close to curiosity. The Twi'lek froze. Her lekku twitched. She looked down at her hands, clenched around the warm flask. Names were power. Names were targets. In the Temple, she'd been Initiate Kae, then Padawan Tann. Now? She was debris floating in Revan's wake. Her throat tightened. She opened her mouth. Hesitated.
**Outside, hyperspace streaked past in endless blue.**
Inside, the silence thickened. Revan waited, motionless. The droid beeped softly from a corner, analyzing shield integrity. One of the younglings whimpered in the hold, swiftly shushed. The Twi'lek lifted her chin. Her green eyes met the blank visor's reflection in the transparisteel. "Elara," she said, the name raw, unfiltered. No title. No lineage. Just Elara. It hung in the air between them—small, defiant, terrifyingly fragile. Like a seed tossed onto scorched earth. Revan's helmet inclined, a bare centimeter. Acknowledgement. Or assessment. His gloved hand slid back to the controls, resting there. Ready. Waiting. The caf steamed. The stars blurred. The silence, now, held the weight of a name spoken aloud in the dark.
**He leaned forward abruptly.**
Servos hissed in his armor. His crimson gauntlet stabbed at the navicomputer. Coordinates flashed—a flicker of crimson digits against the blue void. "Imperial interdiction net tightening," his modulator rasped, low and urgent. "Coruscant's gravity shadow extends further than intel predicted." Outside, the streaking light warped subtly—a telltale shimmer at the tunnel's edge. Reality pressing in. Elara stiffened, her fingers tightening on the thermos. "The blind spot? The Foundry debris?" Revan's helmet tilted. A negative. "Compromised. Their sensors are adaptive. Hunting us." The droid chirped confirmation, projecting a tactical overlay: crimson pincers closing around their hyperspace vector. Time evaporated. Safety dissolved. Revan's voice cut through the rising dread, stripped bare: **"We need to get out of this system."** Not a suggestion. A death sentence avoided only by speed. His hand clenched the hyperspace lever.
**The freighter screamed.**
Not metaphorically. Durasteel groaned as Revan slammed the lever back, wrenching them violently from hyperspace. Stars snapped into brutal focus. Not deep space. Not freedom. Instead, the bloated, irradiated corpse of a gas giant filled the viewport—Nal Hutta's poisoned cousin, its atmosphere churning in sickly greens and browns. Imperial signals bloomed instantly on the tactical screen: three Victory-class destroyers, scanners already painting their hull. Proximity alarms shrieked. Turbolaser mounts swiveled. Elara choked on the acrid scent of overloaded capacitors. Revan didn't flinch. His gauntleted hands released the yoke. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his armored right hand. Palm outward. Fingers rigid. Not toward the destroyers. Toward the gas giant's swirling methane storms below. **He didn't just concentrate; he *became* the conduit.** The Force swelled around him like a physical tide—a pressure drop that made Elara's ears pop and the younglings cry out. Steam hissed from seams in his armor as ancient circuits strained. The air crackled with imminent lightning. His outstretched palm trembled, not with weakness, but with the weight of borrowed gravity.
**The gesture completed.**
His hand snapped downward in a brutal, chopping motion. Instinct screamed *push*. Revan *pulled*. Not the destroyers. Not space. He wrenched the gas giant's storm front *upward*—a colossal fist of pressurized methane and ionized particles ripped from the planetary troposphere. It surged toward the fleet like a tsunami of poison lightning. The lead Victory-class shuddered as the tidal wave of atmosphere hit, shields flaring violet before collapsing under the kinetic onslaught. Hull plates buckled. Sensor arrays shattered. The ship listed violently, venting atmosphere. The second destroyer veered hard to starboard, engines flaring white-hot to escape—straight into the third. Durasteel screamed as prow met flank in a slow-motion collision. **Revan didn't watch the carnage.** He seized the yoke again, shoving the freighter into a gut-wrenching dive *through* the expanding debris cloud—chunks of shattered hull and frozen atmosphere hissed past the viewport. Elara saw molten gashes glowing on the colliding destroyers, heard the distorted screams of ruptured comms over the cockpit speakers. Revan's modulator rasped a single word, cold as vacuum: "Vector."
**Chaos became cover.**
The freighter skimmed the upper atmosphere, turbulence hammering the hull as they rode the shockwave of the artificial storm. Sensor ghosts bloomed everywhere—refractions off methane ice, energy surges from the dying destroyers. Imperial targeting systems scrambled, blinded by their own wreckage and the planet's fury. Revan banked hard, threading the needle between a spinning engine nacelle and a tumbling gun turret. Elara glimpsed escape pods ejecting like panicked insects from the crippled warships. The navicomputer flashed—a calculated trajectory arcing away from the gas giant's pull, toward a distant, uncharted hyperspace lane. **He didn't acknowledge the miracle.** His crimson gauntlet moved to the hyperdrive controls, fingers poised. The gas giant's sickly light painted harsh streaks across his Mandalorian mask. Behind them, the third destroyer, hull crumpled and engines sputtering, unleashed a final, desperate barrage—turbolaser fire streaking through the debris field, seeking the vanished freighter. Too late. The stars blurred. Hyperspace swallowed them whole, leaving only wreckage and poisoned silence.
**Inside the cockpit, stillness returned.**
Deep blue vortices streamed past. Revan slumped fractionally in the pilot's seat, the servos in his raised arm whining faintly as he lowered it. The scent of ozone and scorched circuitry hung thick. Elara stared at him, the thermos forgotten in her lap. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the armrests. The healed shoulder throbbed—not with pain, but with the echo of impossible power. He hadn't slammed ships together. He'd weaponized a planet. Legends spoke of Revan shattering fleets. They never described the quiet aftermath—the trembling gauntlet, the faint steam rising from abused joints, the silence louder than any turbolaser. Her gaze shifted from his mask to the reflection of her own wide, haunted eyes in the transparisteel. The question tore free before she could cage it: **"Teach me."**
**Revan turned his head.**
Slowly. The Mandalorian mask regarded her, unblinking, alien. Steam still curled from his vambrace where circuitry had overloaded. The air vibrated with his exhaustion. For a long moment, he said nothing. The hyperdrive hummed. The younglings' muffled sobs drifted from the hold. Then, the modulator cracked the quiet, flat and final: **"No."** No explanation. No condescension. Just a durasteel door slamming shut. Elara flinched as if struck. Disbelief warred with fury. He'd poured caf. He'd shielded children. He'd ripped apart Imperial warships. Yet this? This was where he drew the line? Her lekku coiled tight against her neck. "Why?" The word scraped her throat raw. "You saw the Temple burn! You felt Skywalker's darkness! We need—"
**His hand snapped up.**
A sharp, silencing gesture. Not angry. Tired. Infinitely tired. He leaned back in the pilot's seat, the leather creaking beneath his weight. His crimson gauntlet rested on his thigh, fingers loose. When he spoke again, the distortion couldn't mask the bleakness beneath. **"The last time I taught..."** He paused. The silence stretched, thick with ghosts. Outside, hyperspace light bled blue across his mask. **"...I ended up killing my Padawan."** A beat. The words landed like stones in still water. **"He fell to the Dark Side."** Elara froze. The thermos slipped from her numb fingers, clanging against the deck plating. Caf pooled around her boots, steaming. The horror wasn't in the confession itself; it was in the utter, hollow resignation. No pride. No sorrow. Just a fact. A monument to failure. She saw the phantom shape of that other Padawan—betrayed, twisted, extinguished by the master who'd promised guidance. Her own plea suddenly tasted like ashes.
**He didn't look at her.**
His visor remained fixed on the swirling blue tunnel ahead. Yet Elara felt the weight of centuries settle between them—the crushing legacy of Darth Revan laid bare. Not conquest. Not glory. Not even redemption. Just loss. An endless chain of broken apprentices and shattered trust. His fist clenched slowly, a silent tremor running through the armor. "Malak," he rasped, the name a curse and a lament fused into one syllable. "He was... brilliant. Fierce. Loyal." A hollow chuckle escaped the modulator. "Until he wasn't." The implication hung heavy: teaching had *made* the monster. Teaching had forged the blade that stabbed him in the back. Elara hugged herself, the chill cutting deeper than the Temple's icy waste chutes. Skywalker's molten eyes flashed in her memory. Palpatine's whispers. The Dark Side wasn't some distant abstraction; it was the path walked by Padawans taught by legends. By him.
**Revan shifted.**
A minute adjustment, servos whining faintly. He gestured toward the caf stain spreading on the deck. "That," his modulator grated, the distortion thick with unspoken warning, "...is why." Not cruelty. Not disdain. Preservation. A shield forged from bitter experience. Teaching her would be inviting the same rot to bloom anew. Watching another bright spark twist into something that needed killing. The silence that followed wasn't empty; it was filled with the screams of Malak, the crackle of lightsabers clashing above the Rakatan temple, and the terrible, echoing loneliness of a master who'd created his own destroyer. Elara stared at the spilled caf, the brown liquid seeping into grimy metal seams. Her green eyes lifted, meeting the void-black lenses of his mask. The question wasn't *would* he teach her anymore. It was *could* she ever trust the hands that had once trained annihilation?