SWTOR Fanfic - Adiira and Quinn

[catlinyemaker]

No spoilers.  A private scene.


The trap they’d stumbled into was a bad one, Force wielders disguised as common troops come to parley.  The immediate threat was neutralized, the assassins lying dead in the center of the ballroom.  Unfortunately, the baron they’d meant to protect lay there too.  That left regular troops of both factions to evade in their escape; Quinn and Adiira had taken to an alcove, curtained and private, for a few minutes of highly dubious safety.  He bandaged her side where repeated blows had riven the armor.

Adiira gritted her teeth as he made sure the deep burn was clean.  “Well, Quinn, we certainly danced with the lightning today,” she said wryly. 

His aura abruptly flared against Adiira’s senses, bleeding fear and anger and sorrow.  

“Captain!  Quinn, what is it?” she demanded sharply.  She scanned the wider room and the alcove in which they hid, but there were no new attackers, nothing to explain the surge of pain she felt from him.

He stared down at the char and blood on his hands.  “How can you stand it?  Do you have no feelings at all?” He started to shake.  “This is why it is forbidden to military personnel to fraternize.  I nearly lost you.  YOU NEARLY DIED!  And I couldn’t save you.”  His voice, low and harsh, fell to the barest whisper.

Her quick anger at his first words died to ashes at the last.  “Quinn… Malavai,” she said gently.  His head came up at the use of his first name.  Now that she had his attention, how to phrase what she knew in her bones? 

“I do feel it.  When we are in a firefight, and I can see that you are outmatched and failing... the anguish is exquisite.  And I take it and use it.  I turn it outward against our foes.  Because all I can do to save you, as you are dying, is to make them die faster.”  She shook her head ruefully.  “And the terrible thing is that it works, Malavai.  I love you.  And that love and fear makes me stronger than I’d ever dreamed of being.”

“You are strong enough to embrace all the passions of what we are becoming and use them as I do, I know it.  Or you are strong enough to turn away from them for your own sake, and I wouldn’t stop you.  I’d survive that, if it would be better for you.”  She fell silent and waited for him, closing her eyes like a child in hiding, not wanting to see it happen if he shut himself off from her.  Tears escaped one by one, running slowly down her cheeks, and she didn’t try to stop them.

It wasn’t long at all before his gentle hand was touching her face, wiping them away.  “No,” he said, “I will not cut myself away from my own heart.  You are mine and I am yours, forever, Adiira, no matter what befalls us.”