“So what did give you the scar? A starfighter crash? A battle with a Sith?”
“Oh, nothing so exciting.”
“Tell me!”
Lathril grimaced. “I fell off my speeder when I was a kid.”
Kira gawped for a minute. “Really? That’s it?”
“ ‘Fraid so.”
“Just how fast were you going?”
Lathril shrugged. “A hundred kilos.”
“A hundred??” Her disappointment turned to awe again.
“I liked going fast.”
“I’ll say,” said Kira. She looked away. “I guess that makes sense.”
“What does?”
“Why you’re so careful now.”
“Well, it’s true I’d rather hang onto my last eye.”
Kira coughed awkwardly, then she pointed at the eye patch. “Can you see at all out of that?”
“Not exactly. The, uh, eye is gone, but they wired the plate back into my head. I can’t see, but I can sense, um, heat signatures and things.”
“Sounds disorienting.”
“It was, yes, but you get used to it.”
Kira looked at him inquisitively. “So no one can sneak up on you from that side.”
“No one with a heat signature,” Lathril confirmed.
“So maybe a Trandoshan.”
Lathril shrugged. “Never fought one.”
“Hope you never do,” Kira advised. She looked away again. “They’re slavers, or at least where I come from. Hateful things.”
“Where you come from — where is that?”
Kira looked down. “It’s a long story. I apologize, after you explained your eye and all, but I’d rather not talk about it now.”
“Very well,” said Lathril evenly.
Kira kept flickering her eyes to him though, both directly and out of the corner of her eye. Lathril was about to ask her what was the matter, but she beat him to it: “So when did it happen?”
“This? I told you, when I was a kid. I must’ve been eleven or twelve.”
“This was when you were with the Jedi?”
“No, before.”
“You must’ve been old for a recruit,” said Kira.
“I was, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected when they came to recruit me. The Force runs in my family.”
Kira shifted, looking at her hands. “So you know your family…”
“Yes. I was an old recruit. My parents were Jedi themselves… They left the order when they realized they, well, wanted to have me.”
Kira snorted. “And before that? You said it runs in your family. So are all of your ancestors defected Jedi?”
“Not all,” Lathril said awkwardly. “It skipped my grandparents, as far as I know, and go back too far and they weren’t calling them Jedi, or not on my homeworld. The planet’s had a tradition of Force-users going back for millennia…”
Kira seemed taken aback. “Force-users who are not Jedi or Sith…”
“Yes,” said Lathril impatiently. “They exist. Just usually not in the core worlds, because of the jurisdictions involved.”
Kira was thoughtful. “One day, I’d love to meet one.”
“It’s rare,” Lathril warned. “Balance is hard to keep outside of an established order, and the Sith don’t want any order beyond their own to flourish. There are many ways to the Dark Side, Padawan.”
“The same could be said of the Jedi,” Kira retorted.
Lathril grimaced. Thinking he had better steer the conversation back to safer territory, he said, “With great power comes great responsibility. It’s better someone is setting standards, and that that someone is the Jedi.”
Kira sighed at him. “And to think you sounded so human for a minute.”
“Undisciplined, you mean,” muttered Lathril.
“Well… yes. It was nice.” She poked her tongue at him.
Lathril shook his head. This wasn’t at all going how he wanted. “The Force is greater than all of us, Padawan. To use it is a gift, one we cannot take lightly. And speaking of, you should return to your meditation.”
Kira groaned. “Yes, that’s more the Master Sunwalker I know.” Shaking her head, she got up to leave, leaving Lathril feeling vaguely perturbed.
She had seemed so close to understanding it, only to revert back to advocating for irresponsibility and rash actions again. Lathril watched her as she settled to the work he had given her. There was still so much work to do.