He sighs, "Fine, fine, be all sensible about it. How do we do this then?" He looks around, taking in all the pillows and blankets on the floor, "Or are we doing a slumber party instead?"

"Maybe later," she laughs, and pulls him down onto said pillows. "You probably already know how to meditate, to clear your mind of thoughts and feelings?"

He sits! "Sure, yeah. First step to filling your head is emptying it." 

"Good. Let's start with that." She crosses her legs and takes his hands in hers. "I'll follow your lead."

"Uh... sure," he crosses his legs too, "Okay, I'll just..."

He closes his eyes, settling into a slow pattern of breathing, easy as that. He has to stop himself from reaching for a distracting thought pattern, but that's not too hard - he does sometimes just think about nothing. 

Good.

She breathes with him, settles into the warm emptiness of his mind. A safe place. A place of his own.

But there is something, just beyond... brushing up against the confines of his mind. It's always been there. Reinforcing, strengthing. It's familiar...

She senses it, so he does too. He- flinches back from it, though. It's one thing to know he's force-sensitive, another to... 

She lets him take a breath.

Seperate from your fear. Your thoughts of pain and war. From hate.

He- breathes. Thinks of nothing. His mind is empty, waiting to be filled. All there is is her voice. No fear. No hate.

Think of what you felt when you felt the need to help me, to protect me.

He obeys, remembering- fear, again, but also, a kind of tenderness he- doesn't quite know how to categorize. A longing. A painful kind of determination. 

Open, Atton. Open yourself to me, to the Force, feel it flow through you. Over you. Inside.

Somehow, it's easy. Holding close to her, he reaches out, feeling something like layers of sheer silk brushing against skin as he- tentatively, so tentatively- touches that something beyond. 

It feels like breaking the surface of an ocean. Like escaping the atmosphere of a planet. It feels like breathing clean air, and suffocating on it- there's so much, all around them, and as they adjust they can make out not just that overwhelming sensation, but also individual threads, people, thinking and feeling and moving and living. They can feel the non-sapients, too, animals scurrying through small spaces in the habs, plants carefully rooted into boxes and crates throughout the station. It all breathes, all this life, all this movement, it creates a web of things-of-now, just as all the intentions and actions of that present come together to form an overall sense of things-to-come.

like she's drowning after an eternity without water

-he... turns, looks at her, and. 

A dark, empty hole. Devoid of life and love and — the Force. On the edges a terrible echo of slaughter. Pain. The antithesis of all that is good and solid and real.

So much pain and death. The constant horror and screaming —

screaming

can't move can't see waves of pain and betrayal she did this she ripped apart

He's inside her mind.

He can wall things out so can he wall things

In

He wraps around it, covering it in layer after layer after layer of patterns- distractions, reminders, warnings she'd have to deliberately push through to reach that pain-and-void in the center of her being. Anything that's ever worked for him, to keep others out of his head, he turns to keeping them both out of this part of her head. And then it.. stays. It pulls on her own Force presence, tugging the patterns of her mind and soul into a new path to protect them from the echo. From the wound.