After Kellaro’s special ops team had left, life aboard the frigate grew painfully dull for Brant.
It took some days for his sight to return, and he spent most of it in his suite — the same set of rooms once occupied by Lana — on account that constantly tripping and running into things was both tiring and embarrassing. Some Sith and Jedi learned to use the Force to “see”, after a fashion, but it had certainly never been Brant’s forte.
Once he could get around by squinting and sticking to the well-lit areas, he explored the ship like he had once explored the temples on Dromund Kaas — by moving stealthily and avoiding all the people. Though his skill at going unseen had grown since his apprenticeship, it wasn’t an easy task on a busy military ship. The first few times he was caught where he was not supposed to be, he pleaded that he was only lost, but he soon grew a reputation and often caught aides detaching from their unit to tail him whenever he passed. At last he was asked politely to either stay in his assigned suite or keep to the public areas. These public areas were well-marked, the desk officer told him curtly, and had standard hours of operation.
For a while, at any rate, Brant obeyed the order. One of the public areas was a suite of rooms set aside for use by Jedi. The frigate had clearly housed Force-users before, and there was a spacious deck for lightsaber drills and general strength and aerobics training as well as some private enclaves. The Alliance were clearly more accustomed to accommodating Jedi over Sith though, for these enclaves were more suited to meditation than the Sith’s way of connecting to the Force. They backed onto the side of the frigate, with windows opening out onto the stars, and Brant severely doubted they were properly reinforced for internal impact.
When Brant first discovered the place, he was eager for the excuse to stretch his legs, but he was rather less impressed by his choices of sparring partner. He spent the better part of a day taunting — he termed it encouraging — anyone to duel him, but perhaps predictably, all of the Jedi to a man refused, and it wasn’t long before he was asked to avoid the Force-user’s deck as well.
“It could be worse. I could be torturing your underlings for practice,” he had snarled to the deck officer who informed him of the restriction. That did not go over so well, and Brant stayed in his suite from then on.
Though he had long preferred solitude, this time it dug in him. He had been avoiding thinking about the Emperor and the meaning of his ice-world vision, and now he could do nothing else, lying on his back in bed instead of taking his frustrations out on a target dummy. Worse, his lightsaber had been lost in the fight over Ilum, and even though there were practice vibroswords to spare, he felt the loss of his specially ringing blade as keenly as he might feel the loss of a friend.
If he had ever had any friends…
He ticked them off in his head. Vette and Lana were on Zakuul. Kellaro too, though he still wasn’t sure if he should consider his brother a friend at this point. His old crew was either missing or dead, for he had heard nothing from them, even when he tried keying each of their personal codes into the holocom. He hadn’t thought to ask Lana if Theron was still around, either. So that left…
His father?
Brant spent all one night trying to reach him through the Force, both while he thought the Commander would be awake, and then again when he would be asleep, as some minds were easier to infiltrate through dreams. Both times it was like trying to contact someone who was dead or who had never existed to begin with. It took Brant a while to realize that trying to connect to the ice-world of his vision was useless, for that had been a product of his father’s carbon-freezing, and the Commander certainly wasn’t trapped in it now. Even then, a more normal approach ended up with nothing.
Brant knew he likely could have gotten his father’s holo code from one of the frigate’s officers at any time, but he held back for some reason. He had only known Keel’ath through vague childhood memories and once through a life-and-death situation where neither of them had been at their best. Their relationship felt too distant, yet too poignant, for a mere holocom conversation.
So, he stared at the ceiling for days and avoided all thoughts of the Emperor and of his father.