Chapter Text
Elvina
The room always starts breathing before I do.
Candles tremble in their brackets, little flames bowing toward me like they know who holds the real power here. The air hums, thick and electric, clinging to my skin as if it's trying to crawl inside my lungs.
I sit cross-legged on the cold stone, spine straight, hands on my knees. Eyes closed. Calm.
Inside, I am a wound that never healed.
Inhale. Every wick stretches higher, reaching.
Exhale. Shadows swell and crowd closer.
Somewhere above the ceiling, thunder rolls.
There's no sky down here. No windows. No view of Coruscant's towers or its choking clouds. Only durasteel and stone and the Jedi's idea of safety.
The storm doesn't care. It knows me. It comes anyway.
Smaller, I tell it. Quieter. Less.
Lightning tingles through my fingertips in answer, defiant.
The door hisses open.
The storm tightens like a beast pulling back its lips. I don't have to look to know who it is; his presence drops into the room like a weight into deep water, heavy and controlled, ripples shooting through the Force.
"Elvina."
Mace Windu's voice is as calm as mine pretends to be.
I open my eyes.
He fills the doorway, broad shoulders haloed in the sterile light of the corridor behind him, his dark skin washed in the flicker of my unsteady candles. His gaze moves over the chamber once—flames bowing toward me, thin mist curling in the corners, hair-raising static in the air.
He doesn't flinch. I feel the way the Force cinches tighter around him anyway, like a man bracing against rain he can't stop.
"Master Windu," I say.
I don't stand. He's never ordered me to, and I'm not sure what I'd do if he tried to put his hands on me.
He steps in. The door shuts behind him with a soft, final sigh.
"The Council felt your storm from three systems away," he says.
I let my mouth tilt, not quite into a smile.
"I was meditating," I answer. "Like you told me."
His eyes drop to my hands. Lightning dances harmlessly over my knuckles before I curl my fingers into loose fists and press my palms down into my knees.
"Your meditations shouldn't rattle the Temple's outer sensors," he says. "You know this."
"I tried to make it smaller." My gaze drifts past him to the far wall—the one that's just metal, from floor to ceiling, seamless and suffocating. I've never seen what's behind it. I only feel it: the real sky, straining on the other side.
"I always try."
The wall hums faintly. Only I and the Force hear it.
Mace follows my gaze. For a heartbeat, something softens at the edges of his eyes. Regret, maybe. Or just exhaustion.
"Elvina," he says, voice dipping lower, "you are not like the others."
"I am reminded," I murmur, "every time you come down here."
Thunder purrs above us, closer. One candle gutters out, its wick hissing.
His jaw tightens.
"A group of Padawans were sparring in the west training hall," he says. "When your surge hit, they stumbled. One dropped his saber. Another collapsed outright." He looks back at me. "That was from here. Through walls. Across half the Temple. With you 'trying to make it smaller.'"
Guilt stings, sharp as a cut. The storm inside me bares its teeth anyway.
"I didn't mean—"
"I know." He cuts me off gently. He walks closer, and the wind coiling around me snags his robe, tempted. His saber hilt glints at his hip, that monotonous blue. He never puts his hand on it when I'm in the room. Somehow, that makes me more nervous, not less.
"That is the problem," he says. "You don't mean to. But intent doesn't stop a lightning bolt from burning what it hits."
I drop my eyes to my hands. Lightning kisses my skin, harmless and familiar, aching for somewhere else to go.
"If I'm that dangerous," I say quietly, "why not execute me? Put me down like a rabid nexu. Why lock me in a pretty box and call it training?" The words taste like blasphemy. Good.
He stops right in front of me and kneels. That startles me more than any raised voice ever could. Mace Windu, Master of the Jedi Order, lowers himself until we're eye-level, his face inches from mine.
"Because you are not a beast," he says. "You are a human. The Force saw fit to bless you and burden you. We do not slaughter children because we fear what they might become."
"You just hide them underground," I say. "Seal them behind walls. Name it mercy."
His mouth flattens. He doesn't deny it.
"Do you remember the day we moved you here?" he asks.
The memory lances through me in white: the training hall, the younglings' shrill laughter as their sabers whirled; the snap of temper when one of them mocked my flickering blade; the way the air itself screamed as the storm poured out of me.
The smell of burnt cloth and terror. The crack of tile. The way every sparring circle emptied around me after that—no more partners, just Masters in the doorway and Windu in the center, purple blade humming, eyes sharp and afraid to look afraid.
"Yes," I say. The word is stone in my mouth.
"You were eight," Mace says. "You lost control for three breaths. In those breaths, three children nearly died. If I had not been there, they would have."
Shame curls through me hot and sour. The air feels thick, like I'm breathing steam instead of oxygen.
"So you sealed me away," I whisper. "For balance."
"For protection," he corrects. "Theirs. And yours."
I drag my nails lightly over my thigh to keep from snapping.
"Balance," I repeat. "You keep saying that word."
"It is what keeps us from falling," he says. "Without balance, the Force twists into something else. Something that breaks people."
I look at his face. Really look. At the lines carved at the corners of his eyes by years of war and restraint. At the quiet, iron fatigue in his shoulders.
"And what about my balance?" I ask. "Who worries about that, Master?"
Silence. Heavy.
"The galaxy is at war," he says at last. "We do what we can with what we have."
I laugh once, a small, humorless sound.
"You have me," I say. "You just don't use me. Not really. Not where anyone can see."
His gaze sharpens.
"You think this is neglect," he says. "It is restraint."
"From this side of the wall," I say, nodding toward the sealed metal, "it feels a lot like abandonment."
I let the next words fall softly, like a knife I'm too bored to bother hiding.
"At least when you lock up a weapon," I add, "you admit that's what it is."
"We do not see you as a weapon," he says.
I raise a brow. The storm inside me presses against my skin.
"Then why do I only see the sky," I ask, "when the Council has a crisis no one else can fix?"
He doesn't answer, and his silence is all the honesty I need.
"I know you want more," Mace says. "To be out there. To fight. To stand beside Skywalker, Kenobi. You think we are withholding glory from you."
Heat prickles up my throat at the sound of Skywalker's name, unbidden. I've seen his holo-recordings, his ridiculous heroics, the way the Force shines off him like he owns it.
Golden boy. Chosen One. A storm of his own.
"Wouldn't I help?" I ask, too quick. "If you unleashed me?"
"A storm unleashed indiscriminately doesn't heal a forest," he says. "It burns it down."
"Maybe it needs burning."
The words jump out of me before I can leash them. Lightning cracks across the floor between us, thin and fast. It leaves a black vein in the stone.
Mace's eyes flick to it. For a heartbeat, I smell fear in the room. Not of the storm—of how fast I learned to ride it. Of how quickly my saber found his throat the last time we sparred and how neither of us has stepped into a ring together since.
"Elvina," he says, and my name is a warning.
I unclench my jaw, force my fingers to relax.
He stands. The moment breaks.
"There will come a day," he says, looking down at me, "when we will have no choice but to open every door we've locked. When we will call on everything you are, without restraint."
His gaze returns to the wall.
"When that day comes," he continues, "I need to know you can step out there without destroying everything on the other side."
My throat tightens.
"How am I supposed to learn not to break things," I ask, "if you never let me touch anything?"
He has no good answer. The Force around him goes quiet, like it's holding its breath.
Instead of lying, he rests one hand briefly on the edge of the bunk beside me. It's the closest he ever gets to a touch.
"Smaller storms," he says. "For now."
His eyes linger on me for a beat too long—as if he can see, in some painful future, a Council chamber where I stand at the center instead of in the basement.
He turns and walks to the door. It opens with a soft hiss, light from the corridor spilling in.
"And Elvina?" he says over his shoulder.
"Yes?"
"Whatever you think of this room..." His voice is steady, but I feel the truth under it. "Remember this: there are others out there who would not hesitate to use what you are. To own it. I fear them more than I fear you."
The door shuts before I can tell him that doesn't make me feel better.
The lock engages with a heavy clunk that echoes in my bones.
For a while, I don't move. The silence presses in on my ears until I can hear my own pulse.
Smaller storms.
I inhale. Exhale. Pull the clouds inside me tight, compressing everything into something sharp and compact. The candles calm. The air clears. The thunder fades to a far-off murmur.
But the crack in the stone between my knees is still there, dark and jagged.
I stare at it, then lift my gaze to the blank wall and the invisible sky beyond it.
Somewhere out there, the storm is real. The air is wild. There's a boy the galaxy calls Chosen, striding through fire like it was made for him.
They put me in a box and told me to be grateful.
My fingers itch.
Smaller storms, I think.
For now.