Dynasty

vii. LOVELORN

vii.
LOVELORN

✶

"This is the truth of the matter: I am / The son of a storm. / Look, every one has to be the son / Of something."
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Frantz Fanon

Quinlan Vos was a storm. A hurricane, rather, made of dark skin and nimble wit and tattoos as yellow as pollen, he was a recurring natural disaster that returned to the same shore every year without fail, wiping away every stone, every pillar, every inch of civilisation in his path—destroying every conceived notion of order and discipline, leaving only mud and debris and ruin in his wake, and a lingering astonishment like the dying veins of a flood, like the metallic taste of rain.

At least, that was how the Order seemed to perceive him, their maverick Jedi knight, their tempest of ill-timed crescent moon grins and walking divergence from the precious, ancient ways, persistent like a plague. However, his skill was indisputable, his charm sly and impish, and anyone could see it: in the way he wielded his lightsabre with such casual mastery or arced through the air, contorting himself with the greatest command of his own body Chrysaor had ever seen. Or in the way he could let a word slip from his lips that would have all the men at a table rise in anger, hands moving swiftly to their weapons, and with another sit them down again, howling in laughter, their hostility forgotten and faded as if a distant memory.

Chrysaor had decided it was his adherence to the Jedi way that failed him—or his lack thereof. Quinlan was no pious man, and like water he had slipped through the cracks in the Order's hands, ungraspable, wheedling his way out with his words.

Or, maybe, he had somersaulted out. Chrysaor would not have been surprised, either way.

To Chrysaor, Quinlan was nothing destructive, no threat to anything but close-mindedness; unlike the Order, Chrysaor welcomed the storm. He had heard only whispers of disdain towards his master, of course, but he had thought on it, as he did of most things, and decided it could be much, much worse—as gristle-thick as the tale was spun, Quinlan was no Sith. He was no Dooku, who had let corruption slip into him, sharp as a knife, let it draw blood he would reclaim through war, blood he would spill across the galaxy. Quinlan was not so selfish, nor was he so vengeful, and as far as Chrysaor was aware, there was nothing that had disillusioned him from the Jedi way; he had simply never been enchanted with it in the first place.

The shadows were there, certainly, cast across the topography of Quinlan's face, dancing dark over scars, old wounds healed over, but he was not tempted by them. Besides, there were no shadows without light, and in Quinlan, the light was always in reach. And his padawan did not take issue with his jokes, either; Chrysaor was handsome, even with his ministrations, his little tics, his little twitches, but his true beauty was revealed in his laughter, in his smile, and Quinlan was second to none in drawing it out of him.

Chrysaor had been the last of the Mandalorian four to be assigned a master. Nadya, the eldest, had been first, and she had the greatest story to tell of it, the most ceremony. It had been like any other day in the temple, and Nadya, then a youngling, barely twelve and swallowed up by robes that were not yet her typical black, had picked a fight with a padawan. Back then, her wolf heart was just a cub, growing in its ribcage prison, fed with scraps of this grievance, this and this and this, but still, savagery bled from her skin.

From her lips. She shouted impostor!, and struck him down. The other younglings had crowded around her victim, a circle of buzzards with overlarge sleeves for wings and horrified gasps for birdcalls. (Fallon had once told Chrysaor that vultures did not call as other birds—prettier birds—did, and rather they made little rasps, hisses, grunts that resembled hungry pigs or barking hounds. But still.) Temple guards were called to the scene, gold-bladed sabres activated as they advanced on the girl, but then, they looked at the body.