LUX BONTERI

Lux Bonteri sat bolt upright. He whipped around, looking for the origin of the scream. He could have sworn that he had just heard her voice yell, “Lux! I can’t hold on! Lux, help me!” But there was nothing. No one was nearby, except, well…

Ahsoka. But it wasn’t really her. Just a shell. Her consciousness was long gone, as it had been for three years. Ever since she had fallen into that coma…

Tears began to run down his face, accompanied by silent sobs. He let them do what they would for a few moments, then tried to wipe them away. His hand hit whiskers, and he realized that he had forgotten to shave yesterday. Again.

He had turned into precious little more than a ghost over the past few years. Even though he still made feeble attempts at keeping up his appearances, his hair always seemed to be a mess and he forgot to shave.

His skin color had faded to a near-grey complexion, as if he was constantly sick, even though he was in perfect health. It seemed like his whole body was mourning the loss of Ahsoka, his true love, his fiancée…

He no longer had much energy to do anything. He only really talked to a few people, and when he did, he said little. He kept up his usual Lookout duties, but had the strangest hours. Anakin had once told him that he had even seen him going out at three in the morning.

He had lost track of the concept of time. Now, it was just that it was either dark or light out. It didn’t matter when he slept, it didn’t matter when he ate, and it didn’t matter when he worked. The others left him to it as if he would break if they pushed him too hard, so he didn’t change his ways.

Amni Chelsu, the brilliant Jedi Healer in the New Jedi Order, was constantly on his case. Even though she was often busy healing cuts and wounds, or teaching her two dozen students, she still found time to make sure he ate and slept more than five hours a night.

He and Amni had grown close over the last three years. Not romantically close, but they had become very good friends. Because she was so good at dealing with psychological cases, such as his severe depression, she knew how to help him, and to take away some of his pain.

She could use the Force to take away some of his grief over losing Ahsoka, even if it wasn’t for more than an hour or two. Afterwards, he could almost feel a glimmer of his old self come back. But it would leave as soon as it had come.

Even that second of happiness was enough. It was pretty much all that kept him from going. He would hope beyond all hope that she would wake up one day, but so far it had been futile. The equipment that was hooked up to her would sometimes inform him that she had had a dream, meaning that her brain was still active. That was a good sign.

But when Ahsoka had fallen into the coma under the effects of a toxin known as lectrosterine, which was poisonous to the Togruta species, a part of him had fallen with her.

He looked over at her from his spot in a chair by her bed. The only sigh of life that she was displaying was the slow, but steady rise and fall of her chest. But it was enough. He could spend hours just staring at her. It both cleared his mind and clouded it

Carefully, he took her hand. It was something that he hadn’t done since the beginning of her coma. And at the time had been a total emotional wreck. He was better now, but not by much.

He looked at the ring on her finger. The same night this had all happened, he had proposed to her. He had thought that they would have been married in a few months, maybe a year at the most. But that wasn’t how it had played out.

Then he tried something else he hadn’t done in a long time. He spoke to her. “Ahsoka…” he whispered, his voice a little hoarse, “Ahsoka, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I love you. I love you more than anything. And for as long as I live, my heart is never going to stop beating for you. Never.”

Then he stood, and leant over her. He closed his eyes, and kissed her lightly on the mouth. As his lips were pressed to hers, a kaleidoscope of bittersweet memories flashed behind his eyelids. The first time he had kissed her, when he had seen her in spirit on his way to Moraband, when he had proposed to her…

Breaking the kiss, he jumped away. The memories were too painful to bear. And that kiss… It was just like the first real one, in that alley on Coruscant all those years ago. Like there were electric currents running through his body.

Silently, falling back into his ghost mode, he left the room.

*Oooh, such emotional complexities..... I would list them all but you probably found them, and I'm just too lazy. I have today off because school has decreed it be so and today's a lazy day. I'm writing, but I dont' want to go crazy with the super long author's notes. And btw, CATPIGEONS FOREVER!!!!

Discover a boy on Tatooine with a midichlorian count that's over 20,000 per cell and may the Force be with you,

Sharron