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RAHAM, neutral planet in the Mid-Systems.
Producer of a great percentage of fruit export in the galaxy - as well as a great percentage of Force-sensitive indivuals of which the majority are trained at the Temples, a system of religious institutions devoted to the understanding and utilization of the Force as it's known to the Rahamian people.
To this day, no Rahamians have joined the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.
Besides the Temples, Raham upholds its remote status and only engages in infrequent, most often involentary political dialogue with the surrounding galaxy. The saying, "what happens on Raham stays on Raham" is due to this approach to inter-galactic communication and diplomacy.
Most often, the priests and priestesses of the Temples, that is to say, Force users, also serve as diplomats, senators, representatives and judges in the judicial system both internally and inter-galactically.

GI-ADA ROKEN, 31 years old, Force user and priest at the Temples of Raham.
Has trained as a Force user at the Temples since he was fourteen, working as a diplomat and negotiator since age twenty.
At the entrance of the Empire, he - as the Temples at large - began only using his powers very discreetly, but eventually the Empire came for them as well, however remote they were, and he was one of few who survived what the Rahamians dubbed The Great Purge.
Has been in hiding and on the run ever since. First across Raham, later off-planet as well.
Was seen as having a strong and unusual connection to the Dark Side by his Elders and was being schooled in the use of it by his mentor, Vic Karman, who was the one among the clergy most deeply in tune with this more emotional and temperamental aspect of the Force. He was one of the first to get killed by the Inquisitors upon arrival.

Force users of Rahamian training do not utilize lightsabers, but instead wield a double set of shorter ceremonial lightblades - also used ritualistically, known as lotar. Right blade: lotar-qi and left blade: lotar-he.
The philosophy behind these particular weapons is that you don't have the right to take a life, unless you can make yourself come close enough to a person to injure him with these shorter blades. Looking someone in the eye should prevent most killings, is the thought.

FIC: lucky.

LUCKY




“Boy,” was the first thing Vic said to him when the High Priest introduced them, after Roken had covered the three-day distance between his village and the Temple City, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, “who gave you your red hair?”

“Don’t know,” Roken replied, his duffel bag long since set aside in the room the High Priest had secured for him, his hands were restless, his fingers felt too long. It had been his father’s insistence that had sent him here; the third suffocating roustabout who’d given him too much attitude or gotten too handsy or who didn’t want him back when he wanted… You need a stability I can’t afford you, son, he’d said, embracing him, shoulders quivering. Roken knew what he meant was, we need a security you can’t provide. “Neither my mother nor my dad is a redhead.”

A long moment the older man just looked at him. He wasn’t a particularly striking man, he was very bulky and had strong shoulders, upper arms like tree trunks. His hands were burned, like there were spots on his face where warm ashes had singed his skin. He worked as a smithy in the Temple Forges. He harnessed the fire, they said. He was better at that than anyone.

“Someone with foresight, then,” Vic told him before holding out one soothed hand, giving him his name as well. Roken said his own name, too.

“But no one calls me Gi-Ada,” he quickly added, “my family is pretty prominent back at the village, so everyone just calls me Roken and knows what it implies.”

“Here you’ll have to make it imply something else, I guess,” Vic shrugged. “Ever welded anything in your short life, Roken?”

“I’m fourteen,” Roken protested.

“With a little luck, you’ll live to be a hundred,” Vic retorted, turning on his heel and walking off to the west-end of the complex where the Forges were located. Roken had already got the full tour, so he followed without pause; he knew they made all the armour, weapons and material for the whole Temple institution there. The Temples were self-reliant. Too many and too much relied on them for the alternative to be an option.

“My father always says there’s no such thing as luck.”

“And yet, he got a son with flames for hair when he wasn’t anywhere near as extraordinary himself.”

Although Roken wanted to object again against what sounded pretty insulting towards his dad, another and much stronger part of him basked in the praise from this imposing, undeniably impressive man walking in front of him. He watched his back and had to half-run to keep up, but he didn’t mind.

For the first time, maybe ever, he felt at home somewhere, like a deep thrumming in his chest. It was only in the moment he realized this that he also realized he’d always been uncomfortable back at the village. His father had always known, too, and done his best to accommodate.

Until now.

Now, he’d let go. That’s what he’d meant by stability.

__________

They’d learned about the Force at school, of course. He’d sat through the obligatory introductions to midichlorians and the religious understanding of the Force as a theoretic power. All that stuff wasn’t new to him.

What was new was Vic who’d make him sit in front of the hearth, close enough that the heat would bite into his skin and heat him up from all sides at once, like he could feel the air alive with it. Like he could feel the fire as a pulsing through the early dusk. A warm heartbeat.

“Roken,” Vic said, manning the air blast and making the flames explode in a large, bright glimpse of orange in front of Roken’s eyes, so bright it burned a little. So close. It almost felt like texture and movement between his fingers, too long and too gangly, like all of him, like the rest. “Why are you here?”

A pause. Roken didn’t want to tell him the truth. Something about it felt embarrassing, but he couldn’t evade a direct question either, could he? “People I was mad at started getting choked,” he said, finally. “Before, it was just stuff getting dropped from up high, smashing things without touching them. That, I did on purpose.”

There was silence for a while. Vic worked, shaping a metal plate into a shape they could use for the roof that had caved in over the Meditation Center.

“You choked people on purpose, too,” he finally replied, very slowly, very carefully. Roken felt something else than the fire flame up, then. A wall of red-hot metal seemed to answer him, as if he was actively leaning against it. Stepping back one step, two, he looked over and met Vic’s eyes. “The Force requires deliberation. Without intent, nothing happens. The Force won’t answer unless we ask.”

No one had ever told him anything about this in class. Roken stubbed his toe against the ground.

“I just got so angry,” he replied.

“That’s good,” Vic said, to Roken’s surprise. It wasn’t the answer he’d expected. Nowhere else had he ever been assured that his temper was helpful in any way. “Anger is as good a place to start as any.”

Once more, the air from the blast made the flames rise and grow and burn hotter, bigger, greater.

__________

Two years later, he’d begin training with his Lohar, built with metals from the Forges, made for his hold in particular by Vic himself and equipped with Kyber that they’d done their once in a lifetime off-planet journey for. The two, short blades were purplish in colour, still slightly pale, Roken had complained, though Vic had assured him, they’d come to reflect him as time went on.

Vic didn’t train with him by himself. He wasn’t a natural swordsman and he’d quickly gotten the feeling that Roken would be, so he’d called in the assistance from Uro Acene who was known as the best dagger-wielder in the entire institution. He wasn’t very tall, nothing like Roken’s six feet plus and the first thing Roken did when he entered the compound was turning to Vic and say, “I mean, I guess he can reach high enough to cut off my dick.”

It happened so fast that there was no stopping it. Although everything in the air screamed, danger, behind you, Roken didn’t have time to spin, he hardly had time to move before he had a yellow blade, the Lotar-qi, inches from his lower neck and the other, the Lotar-he, pointing directly into his groin.

“I reach just fine,” Uro muttered against his ear, and he had an unusually deep, guttural voice that made Roken’s cock not care all that much that it was under attack. Besides. Uro was stepping back again, taking his blades with him.

After that, Vic eventually leaving them to it, it was a lot of training blindfolded, feeling for every attack, averting weapons he couldn’t see, but felt the song of the more strongly he wanted Uro on his knees in front of him with his cock down his throat. That wasn’t what the Force told him, of course, that was all on him, like the roustabout he’d slammed up against the barn wall years earlier because he’d said, kid, forget it, way too young for me.

Too young for what, Roken had asked him while he’d struggled and gasped and panted.

“Stretch out with your feelings,” Uro urged when he’d caught him up against one of the middle pillars once more. They were panting into each other’s mouths, like the roustabout had panted before his dad could get there and save him. Save them both.

“All of them,” Roken asked, shouldering him away and leaping into the air, carrying half-across the room where Uro had run off to, coward. He slammed him up against the opposite wall, tearing off the blindfold with his Lohar dangling from the wrist-straps, dropping the offending fabric to the ground before more or less shoving his hand into the other man’s crotch.

Eyebrow-raise. Uro, said, “all of them.”

__________

“You talk a lot,” Vic at some point commented, after Roken had given him yet another speech on the unfairness of the trading system that favoured the resident shoppers over the nomads who couldn’t be certain they’d make it to a specific marketplace in time for the export’s arrival and distribution. “Don’t think your place is really in crafts, Roken. We should find someone from the Diplomatic Chambers to train you.”

Who he found was Asla Tarn, a woman almost as tall as Roken, but only almost, said to be the best negotiator in her generation and she’d served in the Diplomatic Chambers since she was fifteen. In comparison, Roken was eighteen now. He had a lot of catching up to do.

He didn’t impress her. It provoked him endlessly, that whenever he opened his mouth, the first thing she would do was to shush him and tell him to, “make it concise.”

“You’ll let me talk now,” he told her angrily after a couple of weeks like that, staring at her with narrowed eyes and slightly bated breath, slightly hardening cock, and reached out for her mind, suggesting every word to her inwardly, watching how her gaze went from following his hand to empty, pliant at his proposition.

It lasted all of two seconds, of course, then she bit back, “that’s not politics, that’s force, Roken.” Her eyes were incredibly brown as they blinked back into consciousness.

“Yes, isn’t that what we’re working with,” he asked, faux-innocently.

“I don’t think we’re looking at it from the same side,” she retorted, but didn’t dismiss him. When he ate her out later, she didn’t complain either and he sure as kriff didn’t make it concise there.

__________

The village he’d arrived at was just like the one he came from, and the one he came from before that. Rahamian architecture was distinctive and similar in style across the planet, a well looked like a well in the south as much as in the north.

He’d worked five weeks in his new job as junior delegate, travelling between cities to ease up negotiations that had soured. Vic sometimes poked him from the Forges, a quiet and non-intrusive way of saying, I miss you, though Roken thought people should just say that, really, instead of all the prodding and the semi-professional requests that Asla kept sending his way to make him remember she existed. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten, it was just that he’d moved on, quite physically, too. Like he’d moved on from Uro and from Vic, the Temples, his home, long ago.

If Vic had taught him anything, it was that there was no home in buildings, the home had to be in you and it had to be in the Force, only that way you’d ever find peace, Light Side, Dark Side, it didn’t matter. If you wanted rest, you’d have to look within.

His mental landscape when he meditated was a simple barn building, resembling the one where he had once slammed a man twice his age up against the wall and almost killed him.

That was his centre.

They were arguing loudly on both sides of him, the two parties trying to find a reasonable and non-violent way of dividing farmland. Roken looked from one man, beefy and self-important, thinking he’d won already, to the other who was desperate, angry, carrying a blaster strapped to his lower back. After this, he would be going back to Temple City.

It'd be nice to be with Vic in more than mind.

Knowing what was waiting back at the Temples, Uro should be on leave from whatever secret missions he was being shipped off to these days as well, Roken didn’t honestly have neither the time nor the patience for this kind of stubbornness. Attitude. Force. He stood up, making both men in question turn to him, their respective delegations turning their attention the same way, focusing inward on the barn, on the high ceilings and the light through the windows beneath the trusses. He could feel their emotions reaching out towards him, the anger, the fear. He might not care, but for these people this was a matter of life and death.

Feelings didn’t lie. No matter the reality of it.

“You are going to give the excess farmland to the poorhouse.” It was a suggestion, but it was meant to be followed. He moved his hand discreetly, nudging the beefy man on his right, the future murderer on his left. The whole room fell silent, not in shock, but in that special kind of reverence that obedience required. Both men had enormous amounts of land at their disposal already. Even if their pride might be life or death to them right now, Roken could easily think of people that land would matter more to on the long term.

Half an hour later, he exited the building, papers signed, arrangement in order.

He nudged Vic back, got lucky. The smirk should be audible.

Or did they, Vic prodded, as if with a red-hot poker, minutes later.

Roken mounted his speeder and waited for his secretary to take a seat behind him, arms around his waist, she was a nice girl.

Well. I was there, so yes.