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"They don't deserve you." It's not the first time these words have been said to him, but it's the first time they stick, little blades of steel plunging into the soft skin of his soul.
Jedi, as a general rule of thumb, fought with lightsabers. As messy as a fight can be, a burning saber made of too-hot light tended to leave cauterized, clinical wounds that didn't bleed.
This was anything but. Absently, Scar flexes his hands, once, twice. Blood coagulates in the joints of his fingers, settling comfortably in the creases of his skin, and there's the slow realization that a fight without his saber feels so much more intimate than he'd thought. His focus jumps: to his hands, to Grian, to the moments prior where violence overtook the calm of his thoughts - his mind feels fractured, a myriad of tiny pieces he cannot find in himself to properly assemble again.
("I'll take you apart pieces by pieces," Grian had said, his eyes dark as he watched Scar struggling to breathe through the pain. "I don't think you'll ever find a version of you that does not have my face in your eyes, and my name in your teeth."
"You loathe me that much?" Scar had answered, the smile on his face betrayed by the slight tremble of his arm as Grian's boot didn't seem to move away from the broken bone.
The Mand'alor only got closer, resting his elbow on his knee as the pressure increased, letting the flat heel of his shoe dig further into his flesh. Scar couldn't stop the hiss of pain escaping from his mouth. This close, he didn't need the Force to feel the rush of danger overtaking Grian's smile. "Because I like you that much.")
The reality of it doesn't hit him, but again the edges of what was real and what was a part of the giant web Grian had spun around him blend together until all is left is the knowledge that something happened, and the burning skin of Grian's lips tucked against his neck.
Deserve me? He reflects looking back at the bodies strewn carelessly on the floor. Grian is still plastered against his back, the bone of his chin resting against the tense line of his shoulders, and the sharp curves of his beskar'gam dampen the Force around him until all Scar can feel is the unsteady beat of his heart and the way his mind cannot seem to escape the raging ocean it's been drowning in.
"I'm a Jedi." The words come through his teeth, jaws locking up as if to make them unheard, and Scar brutally wrenches himself away from Grian and the weight of his own two hands.
Something cold flashes in the Mand'alor's eyes and the tight turn of his lips folds his face into the expression Grian often wears whenever Scar does something to displease him.
"The perfect Jetii, are you?" He sneers, planting his feet against the floor, a stubborn man marching against the river.
An equally cold retort is on his tongue before his eyes catch into a ray of sun, the way the white of stardust clung into the shapes of unmoving corpses, and Scar falters. Grian grins, triumphant before any words can make it out of his mouth. "So all that is in your Jetii code then?"
With calculated nonchalance he takes a step, nudging the open hand of a fallen Twi'lek away. Scar cannot allow himself to step back.
"Jedi are allowed to defend themselves."Scar states firmly, watching with something close to fascination as Grian's footsteps echo wetly against the floor, a clear path of bloody imprints heading his way.
Grian laughs. "But, my dear Scar, they weren't attacking you, they were here for me."
"Jedi are peacekeepers. I simply... prevented political unrest." Something in him struggles. He can feel the slow bubbling in his chest, a boiling mess of emotions the Force cannot seem to even comprehend. There is no emotion, there is peace. The voice of his master rings, but how can there be peace, when Scar is fighting a daily battle against his own desires? How can there be no emotion, when Grian looks at him with his nebula-dark eyes and the way his teeth glint in the moonlight when he smiles in the shadows of their room?
Scar is good at what he does. He negotiates, smiles, talks, and talks around leaders until they're both shaking hands. The fights too, are something he is not that bad at. He is good at what he does, but perhaps, he fails in the most critical part of the work - the first thing they're taught, the most branding part of themselves - I'm a Jedi, he had said moments earlier when his chest didnt feel like a tectonical shift had unearthed a well of magma so deep it had burned its way through his lungs. Only he's not quite sure it's true.
"Prevented political unrest?" As Grian stalks closer, it is almost instinctual to take a step back, and with the graceful moves of a predator on the hunt, the other clings to the wrinkled fabric of Scar's shirt, and does not let go. "Wait, we can... talk, I-" His voice comes on too high, and he can't even summon a shadow of his trademark smile on his face.
Grian cuts him before he can even begin, sighing in carefully controlled anger. "Scar." The speed at which his teeth clink together in their haste to shut him up makes his head spin. He had the advantage before and before and before. Now all that's left in this room is him, Grian, and the blood staining every part of Scar that matters.
There's a silence. The whole room is quiet when Grian suddenly smiles. It is not kind. "What about... attachments?" Scar turns rigid, and the Force weakly urges him to- do something maybe, but there are cold fingers aligning themselves against his neck, cutting nails resting just over the thin skin covering his vertebrae, and it is getting hard not to let the sharpness of fear nestles into the quick beating flesh of his heart. "Have you been a good little Jetii in this too?"
His breath stutters. Memories flash in the handful of seconds it takes for him to gather back his composure, but it's enough time to bring an acidic aftertaste to his words. "Jedi are not forbidden... romantic relationships."
The sentence stumbles, cut abruptly in two before Scar can mangle it into something much more guarded than saying something awfully stupid like love. What they are is... difficult - to define, to fight against. All Scar allows himself to know is that 3 months into his 'stay' here, a second throne was added next to the Mand'alor's, and no one has yet to sit on it.
He does not delve deeper into this other than smothering the icy feeling of doom it brings him whenever his eyes land on it.
The Mand'alor is quick to capitalize on his mistake. Fakely vulnerable, the white of his throat bobbing as he swallows, Grian whispers low against his ear. "So you don't love me?"
Scar doesn't say anything.
Slowly, a cruel smile strikes through the dark storm on his face. "You'd have me love another man?"
Something in him snaps, and his fingers are the ones closing around Grian's wrist, expertly dodging the solid beskar of his armor. "Do not." Scar cannot erase the dark staining his voice.
Grian smiles, this time soft, and looks tenderly at the fingers holding him with something close to desperation. "That doesn't sound very 'Jedi' of you, cyare."
The cloth under his fingers is thin, and Scar can feel the pulse underneath it, calm and warm.
He kisses him. What else could he do? I am losing all that I was, he thinks, and you are all that remains.
There's a burning inside of him no water can heal, an open wound no bacta or Healer could close. Around them the Force sings, or maybe screams, but Scar is all too consumed by the flames and the way Grian holds him to care.
Maybe it was time to be honest with himself: Scar had never been a good Jedi.
The thing that everyone tells you about the Dark side of the force is that it is greedy. That it'll take and take and take. They don't tell the what, the how, or the why. They just say "Falling? You don't come back from that." And they are not wrong. You, the you that simultaneously exists and dies with every hard-earned second of survival, that you is- well, no longer you.
They're not wrong, but perhaps they're not quite right either. The correct phrasing would have probably been that you don't come back from that the same. Hunger, unlike satiety, never fails to return.
Grian kisses him, open-mouthed, hot, possessive, and the most damning thing of it all is that Scar kisses him back with twice as much want.
The next time he opens his eyes, feverish and not at all there, the emerald of his pupils blends with the shine of molten gold.
"What have you done to me?" He half-pleads, free-falling into the ravenous jaws of the abyss. There is no answer.