I should be getting up Allana thought, but only curled in tighter on the couch where she’d dropped when the first wave of Force pulses from the fight outside had hit her. Her father was a darkening blot in the Force, like ink spreading out and out and out from the tip of a fountain pen. That was bad enough, was always enough to make her remember being small and powerless and unable to understand, just screaming instinctively as something safe turned to something wrong. That was bad enough but Cade was worse, was just not-there, like a black hole, conspicuous only when life disappeared into it. There were still echoes of children in her mind, screams and fear and that was horrible, so horrible she wouldn’t have been able to imagine feeling anything like it if she hadn’t experienced it, but there was worse, there were the echoes of protective desperation that let her imagine the older ones trying to hide the younger children, a girl running downstairs to try locking the door to the room where they kept the hamsters or guinea pigs in their cages, that let her imagine them as more than a mass of innocent fear, that let her imagine their faces…
I should have fought him. I should have made myself get up and go after him, even if he shattered every bone in my body, even if that meant I let him hurt Dawn, as long as it meant Dad got there before he was gone. She didn’t blame herself, not really, not in a way where she acknowledged fault, but it was like when she’d been young and she’d knocked over a present her mother had sent her for her birthday, a little glass statue, and she’d seen it falling and reached out for it, felt her fingers brush it, but she’d missed. That had been in the days when she’d first come to live with her grandparents and she’d missed her mother so much, had attached meaning to that statue so that more than glass lay shattered on the floor and had cried as she crouched on the floor trying to pick up the pieces and thinking I could have caught it. She pressed her face into the back of the couch until it felt like the world was just that, an almost suffocating cocoon.
But, of course, that was an illusion that couldn’t be maintained. There was the Force and that meant you could never shut your eyes, not really, because it gave you other ways of seeing. She could sense the fight that was gearing up, the darkness against the nothingness, and her mind was riveted, locked on it, even though she knew she should be going over to Kon’s now. He’d seen the aftermath of the massacre she’d felt and she knew it was getting to him, the inability to sleep and the headaches, which worried her because she got the feeling he wasn’t supposed to get headaches, and also the fact that he was so kriffing dense about taking care of himself sometimes. The affectionate, worried irritation was enough of a distraction for her to manage to sit up and run her hands through her hair, shaking out some of the tangles and frizz, and to clear her head a little.
I can’t do anything now, I missed my chance for that, but I won’t be a distraction. Dad won’t need to feel us despairing, breaking, while he’s fighting. I can’t help, but I can at least keep it from being harder, and maybe I can help Kon at least, she decided as she ducked her head and took a couple of deep breaths. There wasn’t time to meditate properly and so she just calmed herself as much as she could, splashed some water on her face, and then headed down the two flights of stairs that separated her from her maybe-more-than-friend.
When she reached Kon’s door she raised her hand to knock but, remembering his headache, changed her mind at the last moment and eased the door open gently instead, not enough to see inside but enough to call quietly through the opening, “Hey, it’s Allana, can I come in?”