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The memory is as clear as the waters of the Thousand Fountains on Coruscant, in spite of his youth, in spite of the long passage of years between then and adulthood.
Mical is six, and has lived in the Dantooine Enclave for a little over a year. He’s progressing reasonably well in his studies, or so he feels—his teachers whisper “average,” “little stamina” and “mediocre control” when they believe him to be out of earshot, and as such, Mical pretends not to hear them. Eavesdropping is impolite, after all, and he’ll just work harder, until their reports of him are more flattering. After all, hard work means something, does it not?
Mical is six, and his favorite class is the one in which the youngest residents of the Enclave are taught the first of the mysteries of the Force. Lightsaber combat, resistance to poisons, resistance to extreme heat and cold, these things hold little interest for him (He is not exactly a typical six-year-old. He knows.). The mysteries of the Force, exploration and manipulation, holds greater appeal. It is as touching on the edges of a vast wilderness, taking his first steps into a shadowy unknown, and Mical is nothing if he is not curious. Present to him a black box, and he will spend days trying to get it open, even if doing so seems impossible.
Today, Mical’s favorite class has a guest speaker. The normal teacher hasn’t told anyone who that speaker is, so everyone is curious. One of the masters, surely? Surely only an authority would be brought in to speak of the Force. Mical takes a seat on the front row of mats, eager to see what the day will bring.
As it turns out, the guest speaker is not a master, nor even a knight. Instead, one of the older Padawans slips through the open door, and looks over the class, twenty strong, with a smile on her face that only lets a modicum of trepidation slip. She introduces herself as Kalani Nuna, and sits down in front of them. Her trepidation is forgotten as she begins to speak.
She is young. Even from a child’s point of view, she is clearly young, but she’s still so much older that that hardly matters, and putting her in the role of ‘teacher’ puts her firmly in the role of ‘adult.’ Her long black hair is tied back into a braid that gleams under sunlight, and her slanted brown eyes grow brighter the more she talks, until they are like stars gleaming in the night sky. She is smaller than most of the adults in the Enclave, but in the manner of an adult (as seen through the eyes of a young child) she is still so very tall.
There is something about her that leaves Mical hanging on her every word. Perhaps it’s the fervency in her voice as she speaks of the Force, of how to move in it, and see it flow through others, how to discern truth through the Force. Perhaps it is the earnestness in her eyes as she begins to map it all out. Perhaps it is the warmth she radiates, and the way certain other students look just as wary as Mical is engrossed.
When the class is over, and she heads out the doorway, Mical hurries after her, racing to keep up. The apprentice to the head of the Archives is with her, and both young women look down in curiosity when he finally manages to catch up.
He has questions, and they come spilling out of his mouth in a torrent. Atris murmurs something about an appointment, but Kalani, she kneels down in front of him and smiles brightly. “I have time to answer some questions.”
He keeps her there until the person she was supposed to be meeting with, a markedly amused-looking Vima Sunrider, comes looking for her.
Though brief, Mical never does forget the moment of their meeting.
When she leaves the Jedi to fight for the Republic in the Mandalorian wars, he doesn’t forget that, either.
-0-0-0-
Mical turned eighteen a month after the Battle of Malachor V, ten days after the Mandalorians transmitted their unconditional surrender to the Republic, and the Republic erupted in celebrations. Asides from his birthday, ten days after the end of the Mandalorian wars also marked the day Mical was told to pack his bags and leave the Enclave, and the Jedi Order.
Despite all his hard work, Mical never managed to rise above ‘merely average’ in the eyes of his teachers. The number of Jedi who had heeded the judgment of the High Council and not left the Order to fight in the war were few enough that masters looking for apprentices almost uniformly passed over ‘merely average’ students. Only the truly exceptional were now to become Jedi, it seemed.
Mical was assigned to assist in the infirmary, but his work, though good, was not exceptional enough to make one of the healers take him on as an apprentice. He spent much of his free time in the Archives, but his interest in history was not enough to make any of the archivists or historians consider him as a possible apprentice. So when he came of age, and there was no one who was willing to claim him, Mical was given no way forward but out the Enclave’s doors.
In the old days before the war, when an initiate aged out of the initiate program as Mical had, there was an attempt made to ease them into life outside the Order. He was told that there had once been a job placement program, wherein an initiate, if they had no family to return to, no clear idea of what they were going to do with their lives, and did not wish to labor on Telos, the program would attempt to match them with a job that suited their interests and qualifications. Even if an initiate was considered unsuitable for becoming a full Jedi, they had still often poured years of their life into the Order, and were not well-equipped to survive outside it. It was only fitting to try to help.
But that was before the war, when the Order’s numbers were the highest they had been since the war with Ulic Qel-Droma and Exar Kun. So many Jedi had joined Revan—and stayed with Revan—that the Order’s numbers had been halved, and the job placement program had been shut down to a lack of personnel. Mical was to understand that even the programs on Telos were not taking any new members. So when Mical left the Order, he spent a few days in the nearest spaceport, weighing his options.
Like many of the initiates brought in as young children, Mical was a foundling. He suspected that he could have tracked down his birth family with enough time and resources, but he had no way of knowing if they would take him in, and there was just no connection there. Why would he go to people he had no memory of, no connection with?
(He thought briefly of Kalani. She was the one Jedi who had joined Revan and had chosen also to return. The High Council had exiled her, cast her out. He knew that; they all did. When she returned, the Order had watched with bated breath to see what her fate would be. Mical wouldn’t be surprised if Revan and her loyalists had been, as well.
Trying to find her now would be a fool’s errand, and Mical did not suppose that one brief encounter made for a lasting connection. But still, he couldn’t help but wonder where she wandered now, and if she lacked for companionship on her path. He hoped she didn’t.)
Mical had no higher education, so most skilled professions would be difficult for him to get a foothold in without the Order’s aid, if not outright impossible. Even entering a university would present its own set of difficulties. Most universities required you pay them to gain admission, and Mical did not have much in the way of credits. He also didn’t know very much about the admissions process, but might they not demand certificates providing proof of education that he didn’t have?
A possible answer came to him in the form of a group of weary, dull-eyed soldiers getting off of a Republic transport one day.
The war was over, as every newsfeed was eager to remind viewers at least three times daily. The war was over, but army recruitment had hardly flagged. Over a decade of warfare had left the Republic fleet depleted, and the Rim was vulnerable to raiders. Moreover, there were worlds that needed help rebuilding, and lacked the resources necessary to rebuild on their own; thus, it fell to soldiers to help them.
Mical would never be a Jedi now, but he had still spent most of his life being told that it was his duty to help others, and serve the Republic. It seemed to him that the Order had failed to do either while the war was raging. The galaxy had burned, and the Order had watched, waited, and done little. If one believed the reports coming in from Coruscant, the High Council had believed there was something more than simply the Mandalorians at work, and had not wished to become involved until they were certain of what was happening. Mical could believe that. If the account was true, it would indeed be unwise to rush headlong into the fighting without a clear picture. But while the Rim was burning and the Republic was failing, the Council had given no explicit instruction but to watch, and let it. That hadn’t been good enough for Revan and Malak, nor any of the Jedi who had followed them. If he had been old enough to enlist while the war still raged, it likely wouldn’t have been enough for Mical, either.
Though he was no Jedi, and he hadn’t been old enough to enlist before, he was now. More immediately, Mical was, by Dantooine law, old enough to enter a bar in search of one of the veterans he had seen.
“Well, word is Fleet’s desperate for volunteers,” said veteran, an amputee named Dashen told him. “Recruiters probably won’t care who you were before, so long as you don’t try telling them you’re a Mando—they’re not gonna care about you being a Jedi dropout, kid. All the same—“ he scratched the back of his neck and grimaced “—I wouldn’t go talking about it too loudly in the ranks. S’not such a great idea.”
“I see. And about that educational program you mentioned…”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to have been in the service for at least two years, but once you have been, you can enter any branch of Republic University you like, provided you can pass the entrance exams.”
Mical nodded, pressing his knuckles to his mouth. “Yes, that does sound acceptable,” he murmured.
Dashen laughed. “Thought it might. They put that program in as a sweetener for youngsters like you—for anybody who’d like more education and can’t pay for it, to be honest, but especially the youngsters. Now, have you got any specialties, like demolitions or espionage? You mention that on your application, and it could have a big impact on what kind of program you get into.”
“Well, nothing like demolitions or espionage,” Mical admitted, “but I have spent a great deal of time assisting the healers in the Enclave infirmary.”
With strictly physical medicine, Mical might add. No one had taken the time to teach him Force-based healing, though he would have welcomed the opportunity to learn. The infirmary was short-staffed enough that the healers didn’t have a great deal of time to waste on non-exceptional students. Besides, everyone had known that Mical had been placed in the infirmary as a stopgap, not because he was determined to have any kind of special talent for healing. But he had applied himself there, just as he applied himself to any field of study put before him.
Dashen was nodding now, looking thoughtful. “The Medical Corps can always use more men; damn Mandos liked sniping medics for fun during the war. Well, if you’re planning on applying, let me know when and I’ll go down to the recruitment office with you. Those applications forms can be pretty tough to figure out; I’d be happy to lend you a hand.”
“I can go now, if you have time,” Mical said with a smile.
-0-0-0-
Dashen turned out to be correct in his assessment; the Medical Corps really did need more men, and the recruiters did not particularly care about Mical’s background as a washout from the Jedi Order, beyond their disappointment that he was incapable of using the Force to heal. He was put in the advanced classes of a field medicine program, learning about triage, how to stitch someone up while mortar shells were falling all around you, and other fun things like that. (To be fair, he did learn a fair bit more than he had in the Enclave infirmary, if only because his teachers were focused on teaching him, rather than simply keeping him there because he was required to do something constructive with his time.) But within a few months, there was greater need for Mical and his classmates out on the front than in a classroom.
“It’s going to get cut off, isn’t it?” the Zabrak whimpered, clutching at his leg with trembling hands.
Mical had a smile ready with his reply. “Nothing so serious as that,” he assured him. “You’ve just sustained some broken bones.”
(His instructors had told him how important it was to be optimistic when speaking with patients. You should not feed their spiraling-out-of-control imagination, and if you’re feeling any pessimism of your own, by no means let that slip to them. Mical had picked up something similar from his time in the Enclave infirmary, but somehow, the lesson was so much more important, out here.)
The Zabrak (his name, Mical had never gotten his name) was not exactly reassured by Mical’s optimism, and kept speculating on worst-case scenarios that somehow managed to get worse the more Mical tried to comfort him. In the line of soldiers making their way back to the transports, occasionally one would stop and stare incredulously for a moment, before moving on. The Zabrak never seemed to notice, and kept going himself. Obviously, Mical had missed something important about the lesson on optimism. That, or he was just abysmal at reassuring others. He wasn’t sure which was more likely, and frankly was having an increasingly difficult time seeing why it should matter. He finished bandaging up his patient’s leg, and waited.
Mical couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when one of his colleagues came along with a repulsor-equipped stretcher. They heaved the Zabrak onto the stretcher and joined the line of soldiers marching a weary path back to the transports. When they had loaded the patient in with the other wounded on the medical transport, his colleague, a Rodian named Reesa who had been with the Medical Corps since the beginning of the Mandalorian wars, turned to him and softly asked, “This was your first time out in real battle conditions, wasn’t it?”
He didn’t look at her, instead becoming deeply engrossed with adjusting the strap of his bag as he told her, “Yes, it was.”
“And how was it?”
Never in his life had Mical been exposed to so much noise. Even when a storm had damaged one of the Enclave outbuildings and it had to be repaired, the construction work had been utterly unequal to the deafening clamor of screams, blaster fire, mortar shells dropping all around, and the firefight raging in the skies overhead. Only falling back on the meditative techniques he had been taught on Dantooine had allowed Mical to stay firmly focused on his work, rather than just becoming completely overwhelmed by the noise, the reek of smoke and the rising tide of blood.
“It was… loud,” he said honestly, not particularly willing to discuss the emotions that had welled up inside of him as the battle had dragged further and further on. Mical looked her in the eye (eye contact was important for conveying sincerity, after all) and smiled weakly.
Reesa’s liquid, starry eyes glimmered with compassion. “Battles often are. It comes to bother you less, the more battles you’re in—though sometimes that’s only because hearing loss has set in. If you want to talk about it, I am willing to listen.”
“…Thank you, Reesa.”
“And you do know how to shoot, don’t you, Mical?” she asked anxiously. “I have in the past encountered recruits who were trained exclusively in medicine, with no thought given to self-defense.”
“Yes, Reesa, I can shoot.” Though lightsaber combat had never been Mical’s favorite field, adjusting to so different a weapon as a blaster had been strange, at first. He had become accustomed to it, in time; and now felt at least as confident with a blaster as he had with a lightsaber. (It helped that Mical’s lightsaber training had gone neglected in his last few years in the Enclave, and that he had never had one of his own to grow attached to.)
Her antennae quivered slightly. “Good. Now, let’s head back to base; the paperwork won’t fill itself out.”
Mical boarded the transport with her, clutching at one of the poles and staring down at his feet as it began to slowly move away from the battlefield.
He’d been nowhere near Telos when it was razed, when its people were screaming and dying, when even its atmosphere was poisoned. The echoing screams of Telos had come to him, but they had been as a cold sweat in the night, rather than a knife through the head. A hero had become a conqueror, Jedi, Sith, and Mical was struggling even to process it, let alone form an opinion. It seemed unbelievable, but there was dead Telos hanging in the sky, proof of what Revan and Malak and all those who followed them had become.
There was little to do but watch, and wait, and pray that one of his most commonly-recurring nightmares did not become a thing of waking hours. So far, Mical’s regiment had had no encounters with fallen Jedi. They had been lucky, and he knew their luck couldn’t last forever. He only hoped that when the day came, whoever wielded the lightsaber would be no one he recognized.
-0-0-0-
Once he had been with the Medical Corps long enough to qualify, Mical wasted no time applying to a branch of Republic University. He was now a correspondence student at the Corellia branch of Republic University, studying history, though as of yet he was still trying to complete the required core courses. And lately, he’d gotten into the habit of taking his schoolwork into the mess hall with him.
“Come on, Mical, move your stuff,” Elane told him with a half-hearted glare, as zie and the others began to find seats at the table. “Some of us would rather eat sitting down than standing up, and your datapads are everywhere.”
Ah, the datapad. The Mandalorian wars had galvanized technological advancement in many areas, and the datapad was one of them. Where once your average datapad could hold the spread-out of your grocery list and a few memos from work, nowadays, the trusty datapad had a much greater storage capacity. But not so great that Mical didn’t require half a dozen of them for all of his textbooks, workbooks, homework assignments, study guides and essays.
Mical placed all but one of his datapads—the one holding some reading assignments for the evening—back in the bag sitting at his feet as his compatriots crowded into the little table. “Sorry,” he said to Elane. “I just get… carried away, sometimes.”
Elane waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. I just wish you wouldn’t bring your datapads into the mess; you’re gonna get crumbs on them, eventually.”
Tonight, at least, that seemed distinctly unlikely. The supper they had been served tonight was dry, salted jerky (Mical wasn’t certain of the type of meat, but he thought it might be nerf or gizka), and a dark, slightly lumpy gelatin that tasted faintly of fruit and molasses, but unless you were concentrating didn’t really seem to have any flavor at all. Veg-meat and ration bars in several different flavors were being offered for anyone who didn’t want or couldn’t digest what was coming out of the kitchen. However, in the interest of making veg-meat and ration bars something that anyone of any species could eat without being poisoned, the developer had only succeeded in making something that, while it was physically safe to eat, it was so unappealing that you wouldn’t really want to. Besides, the veg-meat had smelled off, and the Bothan in line in front of Mical had given it a noticeably wide berth.
Regardless of whether or not the food was something even capable of leaving crumbs, the group tucked in and ate with vigor. So long as it wasn’t something that might make them sick, any food was good food.
As Mical slowly read through his assignment, keeping the datapad for enough from his plate that Elane wouldn’t be bothered, conversation began to ripple up from heads bowed over plates.
“Did those letters you sent to your family ever get through?”
“Yes, they did.”
“Oh? That’s good to hear. I was thinking about sending some letters out myself next time I get a chance; it’s nice to know they can actually get through…”
…
“…And I went to him and it was like never happened. He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Are you frakking kidding me? The sithspawn seriously thinks he can get away with that?!”
“So it would seem. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just go to my CO and file a complaint…”
…
“I’ve heard from my buddy who’s fighting on the Eshan front. It really doesn’t look good.”
“Oh, come on, we can still beat those bastards back.”
“Have you been looking at the same reports I have? I don’t think you’d be saying that if you had.”
Mical did join in on the talking sometimes, though tonight he wasn’t really in the mood. Even if the conversations floating around him were rarely clear of stress, they, along with his schoolwork, served an important function; they distracted him from what was likely going on in the medical bay at this very moment. They let him eat without having to think about that.
But then, the conversation shifted to something Mical thought he might have preferred the medical bay’s current activities to.
“Look,” Elane hissed, hir stormy gray eyes blazing as zie stared at the door on the far side of the mess hall. “Look who’s decided to grace us with their presence.”
Mical didn’t really need to look—all he needed was to hear the venom dripping from Elane’s tongue to know who had just walked into the mess hall. He began worrying at his lip, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on his datapad.
With Revan and her forces assailing the Republic, the Jedi Order had at last decided to throw its lot in with the Republic, and combat what threatened it now. Two Jedi had been assigned to Mical’s regiment: Master K’nata Winn, and Knight Nadime Benn-Xixo. Neither of them had approached Mical, and he had no intention of approaching them. Oh, he had every right to be here, and no fear that them becoming aware of him would have led to his dismissal. But the conversation, if either of them by chance knew who he was, what he had once been, would have been an awkward one. And he had never told anyone but the people who had processes his application that he had once been a Jedi initiate. Not long after the war began, the war called the Jedi Civil War, had Mical learned the wisdom of this choice.
“Even Jedi have to eat, Elane,” Adira pointed out, “though I’ll admit I don’t care much for them, either. Especially not Winn; how arrogant she is! Yesterday, I heard her contradict our captain in front of his own men.” Mical caught sight of Adira’s pink, gold-dappled lekku twitching in disgust. Or it might have been an epithet; he wasn’t entirely certain.
“They are arrogant. That’s exactly why I don’t want them eating with us, even if they do have to eat. Hey, Mical?”
Mical jerked his head up, startled by the sound of his own name being called out. “Yes, Elane? What is it?”
Elane’s mouth was twisted in an especially bitter smile, the bitterness that had been with hir since Telos burned. “You’re studying Jedi history, aren’t you? For your degree?”
“Yes,” Mical answered cautiously. “It’s not my only area of study, but yes.” And in what few history classes he had taken thus far, he was already noticing a disparity between the amount of information available in his text books, and the amount of information he had had access to in the Dantooine Archives.
The bitterness in Elane’s smile only deepened as zie asked, “Well, have you ever figured out when it was that the Jedi turned into a bunch of self-righteous, hypocritical assholes?”
“…The Jedi are supposed to be the defenders of peace in the Republic.” ‘Supposed to’ being the key phrase. It was difficult to ignore the fact that they hadn’t done an especially good job of that in recent history.
“You sure about that? ‘Cause that really hadn’t been my experience.” Elane pushed at hir gelatin with hir fork, hand shaking just a little. “The Jedi’s leadership wouldn’t lift a frakking finger to help us when the Mandalorians were trying to set the whole Rim on fire. Revan had to ditch the order to help us, and the Jedi council condemned her, and everyone who followed her.
“I know where they were when Serroco was burning, when Onderon was under occupation, when we were getting shot out of the sky at Dagary Minor and blown to bits on Dxun. They were sitting back and watching, and any Jedi who really wanted to help people had to leave the Order to do it.” Elane began mangling hir gelatin with hir fork. “And then, right after Revan got done saving our necks, she and everybody who followed her turned around and started trying to kill us instead. Telos was burning, and I know exactly where the Jedi were then, too. They were watching from orbit, pointing their fingers and laughing!” zie ground out, slamming hir fork down on the table.
Mical was acutely aware of the others watching him—more than they were watching Elane, in fact. He scanned his friend’s face closely, the red patches on hir cheeks, the way hir eyes glittered like broken glass, before giving an answer. Unfortunately, the only one he could think of, besides retorting that not everyone who followed Revan had fallen to the Dark Side, was “Revan and her followers are not Jedi any longer, Elane. When they turned on the Republic, they became Sith, the ancient enemy of the Jedi.”
Everyone stared at him in silence, looks of thorough incomprehension plastered to their faces. Finally, Adira broke the silence, asking blankly, “What’s the difference?”
Before Mical could say anything, Elane burst out, “Yeah, what is the difference? They fight with lightsabers, they use the Force, and they think they know better than everybody else. A Jedi gone bad is still a Jedi, Mical. They’re all people with too much power who don’t understand why burning the whole galaxy down with their in-fighting might be a bad idea. I’m not really seeing much of a difference here, Mical.”
Mical stared at hir in troubled silence, not really certain of what to say.
-0-0-0-
The years were drawing out so slowly that they felt more like decades, and Mical’s schoolwork wasn’t an effective distraction anymore. If anything, concentrating on readings and assignments, let alone studying for exams, had become a struggle. It was difficult to find it in him to give his mind utterly to such things, when what was going on outside of his schoolbooks threatened to devour not only himself, but the entire galaxy.
“Where do you want this box, Mical?” Elane called out from the door of the infirmary, shifting the box’s weight on hir shoulder with a grimace. There were bags under hir eyes to be that had started out a pale blue, before turning purplish, then nearly black. In that, Mical knew hir face to be a mirror for his own; no one in the regiment slept particularly soundly these days, not even Knight Benn-Xixo, judging by how irritable she had become. (Master Winn had been killed a few weeks back. That likely had more than a little to do with it.)
“Is that the box of hypodermic needles, or the box of sedatives?” Mical asked, fiddling with a datapad and wishing, not for the first time, that the containers for both had been equipped with repulsors, so they wouldn’t have to risk delicate needles or delicate vials carrying the boxes around like that. Especially considering that this was the last shipment of either they were likely to have for a while.
Elane twisted hir neck around so zie could get a better look at the label. “It’s the sedatives.”
“Put them in the Freezer, then.” The Freezer was the term most commonly used for the refrigerated medical storage room in the back of the infirmary. Mical would have used its technical name, but no one ever seemed to remember its technical name. These days, Mical didn’t remember its technical name half of the time. ‘The Freezer’ would suffice. “How much is left?”
“About a dozen more boxes—geez, you’d think somebody’d spring for plasteel instead of this cheap plimsi stuff,” Elane grumbled as zie looked the box over dubiously. “This stuff splits if you set it down wrong; it’ll be a miracle if we get through a firefight without it busting wide open. Mical…” Zie paused, frowning. “Mical, are you alright?”
He blinked his bleary eyes, forgot to smile. “I—Yes, Elane, I am.” After a moment, he set the datapad down on the nearest countertop, unable to bring himself to look at its contents. He checked to make certain that none of the patients were in earshot before turning to Elane and saying woodenly, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the reports are saying that the Leviathan was sighted in this sector not too long ago.” He tried not to swallow too visibly. “And that two of our listening posts in this sector have gone dead.”
Elane’s face blanched a ghastly whitish-gray. Zie had enough sense not to point out that the regiment was strictly ground forces—the Leviathan had never shied away from orbital bombardment. Not once. “I don’t suppose those reports said if we’re going after the Leviathan.”
“We’re not. We are hardly the sort of force one sends after an interdictor ship. The Endar Spire is searching for her.”
An odd look came over Elane’s face. “The Endar Spire, huh?” zie said softly. “That’s interesting.”
Apparently, Elane knew something Mical didn’t. Frowning, he probed, “How so?”
Elane’s mouth quirked in a bleak smile. “The commander of the Endar Spire and I share a homeworld. The commander of the Leviathan, that sithfucker, he’s the one who fragged Telos in the first place.” Mical knew that. Everyone did. There wasn’t a living soul in the Republic who didn’t know the name of Saul Karath, who didn’t know his deeds. “Onasi’s been out for Karath’s blood ever since the war started.”
“I wish him good hunting, then,” Mical murmured, even as ‘Revenge leads to the Dark Side’ beat uselessly at the back of his mind.
“As do I.”
Elane brought in the last of the boxes in silence, taking any medicines to the Freezer and depositing everything else on wire shelves that always seemed too flimsy to bear so great a weight, and always held up anyways. When zie was done, zie started to head out of the infirmary—Elane still had duties of hir own, after all—but paused in the doorway, hand braced on the threshold. “Mical?”
Mical looked at hir in silence, beating away uncertainty and instead attempting a more neutral look.
“We’re going to win,” Elane told him, a touch too forcefully. “I believe that,” zie added, sounding as much as though zie was speaking to hirself as to Mical.
Perhaps Mical was not so skillful at keeping uncertainty off his face as he used to be. “I believe so,” he replied, smiling. “Certainly, the alternative isn’t worth contemplating.”
Elane nodded, and left.
Once alone, Mical went into the Freezer to check over the boxes—they needed to be organized, and if any had been placed there in error, better to do something about it now. In the cold, quiet room, the faint buzz emanating from pale lights his only companion, his smile slipped, inch by inch, until it vanished completely.
‘We’re going to win.’ That was what everyone had been telling themselves for years now, in the face of the Jedi’s finest and the Republic’s most gifted officers turning on them. It was repeated until it became a prayer, and more than once, Mical caught himself doing it, too. ‘We’re going to win,’ ‘we’re going to win,’ ‘we’re going to win,’ ‘we’re going to win,’ repeated until it ceased to be language, and became mere noise.
If they all told themselves that they were going to win, it was because they had to, even in the face of the Republic fleet losing ship after ship to Revan’s armada, because the alternative was just too…
Mical took a deep breath, wresting back control of himself.
He knew, better than anyone in the regiment, perhaps better than Knight Benn-Xixo, what a Republic ruled by the Sith would become. It would be bad enough for non-Force-Sensitives. They would be treated as pawns, as cannon fodder, but when the Sith did not need to involve them in their schemes, they might let them alone, to an extent. As the subjects of cruel overlords who cared for nothing but the expansion of their own power, their lives would be neither safe nor easy, but their peril would be significantly less than that of those found to be strong with the Force.
The Jedi had been working hard to keep the news from getting out, but when Mical was both curious and worried, he found he could get his hands on restricted information rather more easily than most people would have given him credit for. The Order had already been split in two by Revan’s fall, and the Council’s condemnation had not stopped Jedi from joining her, even now.
Sometimes, it seemed as though the stresses of war had proven too great a burden for the Jedi in question to bear. Their teachings failed them, whatever love they bore the Republic failed them, and they fell, lost in the rising wave of bloodlust, hatred and despair. Sometimes, the Jedi in question disappeared for a time, and came back… changed. Their betrayal might be immediate or it might be delayed by weeks, or even months. It was difficult to say in what way they had changed, only that they seemed a touch hollow now, as if someone had reached inside and ripped out something essential. They often bore the marks of torture on their bodies, if they would allow the healers to examine them at all. Worryingly, this was making Republic Command increasingly reluctant to welcome back or even attempt to rescue POWs, which Mical knew would have a destabilizing effect on the army if this carried on.
Jedi, or any Force-Sensitive, for that matter, could… break, under torture. Anyone could break under torture, but someone who felt the Force flow through them would break in a very specific way. He’d not read much on the subject in the Dantooine Archives, and had never been able to find so much as a word on the topic outside of it, but Mical remembered enough. When a Force-Sensitive was tortured, the Force in agony with them could warp their perceptions, their very manner of seeing, until the rage and agony their torture induced in them burned away all sense of empathy. The idea of visiting their rage and agony upon others became the dominating obsession of their mind, and was so cathartic that if offered the opportunity to do it, they would accept, even if it meant serving their tormentors. It was cruder than attempting to manipulate a Jedi into acts that would precipitate their fall, but it also had a much higher success rate. A mind in agony proved malleable in many ways.
Mical wondered if, in the event that the Sith won the war and he wasn’t killed for being on the wrong side of victory, he could go the rest of his life successfully hiding his Force-sensitivity. It wasn’t as though there was any empirical tests that could be conducted to determine Force-sensitivity. Sometimes, a Jedi could detect that someone was strong with the Force simply by stretching out their perceptions, but more concrete proof was required for admission into the Order.
And it had been… easier, easier than Mical had ever expected it would be, for him to simply stop using the Force. He had never disclosed his past to the regular ranks, and he had not actively used the Force since he was dismissed from the Dantooine Enclave. It was possible that he could simply fly under the Sith’s radar, and never fall prey to their conversion-by-torture.
But that seemed unlikely. What was rather more likely was that the Sith would use the Order’s records of everyone who was currently or had ever been a member to track him down. And Mical did not wish to live the life of hiding that flying under the radar would have required. The Republic was something worth fighting for, even if his goals had shifted from healing to mere preservation. Mical wasn’t going to bow his head to Revan and her Sith just to win another year, month, week or day of freedom that could be taken away so easily.
Revan…
Not for the first time, Mical wondered, with equal parts sadness and anger, why Revan would ever have fallen to the Dark Side, ever turned on the Republic. She had labored so long to save them from the Mandalorians, and then to turn round and do this? It made precious little sense, not just to Mical, but to the galaxy at large.
Mical was not the only one with questions. Republic Command had demanded answers from the Order more than once about why Revan would have betrayed everything she had ever believed in, everything she had ever loved and wanted to save. The High Council had blamed her teachers, blamed the war, just blamed her on some occasions. “There are some who carry the seeds of darkness in them from the start,” he remembered hearing on a newsfeed once, “and they will grow no matter what is done.”
In his history lessons, Mical had noticed this pattern reoccurring often when it came to fallen Jedi. Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma fell, and it was the fault of their teachers, or they had simply carried the seeds of darkness in them, and it had simply taken them that long to sprout. (Mical wondered what Vima Sunrider would have said about such a judgment being applied to Qel-Droma. Sometimes, he regretted never getting the chance to speak with Vima when she had visited the Enclave.) The Jedi who followed them? Were weak-willed, or would have been better able to resist seduction if their masters had taught them better.
There was a pattern here.
There was a pattern emerging, and Mical would not pretend it satisfied him anymore. But as he wasn’t even sure that he’d live long enough to do anything about it, he finished organizing the Refrigerator’s shelves, and went back to work.
-0-0-0-
Jedi, even (or especially) fallen Jedi, had a reputation for being unpredictable. It was both a strength and a weakness. A strength, because adversaries had a hard time predicting what a Jedi would do. A weakness because as far as most of the Republic was concerned these days, ‘unpredictable’ was too close kin to ‘unreliable’ for anyone’s comfort.
Revan had proved the most unpredictable (or unreliable, depending on who you asked) Jedi of them all, though considering she seemed to make a point of being the ‘most’ of everything, maybe Mical shouldn’t have been so shocked. As quickly as she had turned on the Republic years ago, she had turned on Malak, and saved the Republic.
Of course, Mical was relieved by this turn of events. How could he not be? Had Revan not returned to the Light, it seemed all too likely that the Republic would have been crushed beneath Malak’s heel. And, like any other, Mical was glad that the Jedi’s once-paragon had returned to them (Though there was perhaps someone else he would have sooner seen return to their ranks).
But Revan’s sudden return to the Jedi raised many questions and many doubts, and the High Council’s official explanation—that when they had captured Revan, they had been able to convince her of her need to atone through words alone—satisfied few. Elane held an even lower opinion of the Jedi now than zie had before war’s end, and everywhere duty took Mical’s regiment, he heard much the same sentiment. ‘How can we trust the Jedi if they go back and forth between good and evil so easily?’
And… and some of the places duty took them made Mical wonder if they had really won the war at all. They visited Rim world after battered, broken Rim world, and you’d never know the Republic had won the war out there. Those worlds needed so much aid, so much protection, and there were some that would likely never recover in this now very resource-poor galaxy. The Rim was once again a haven for raiders, and it was the same situation as after the end of the Mandalorian wars. Too many worlds in need of aid for far too few ships, spread far too thin over so vast a galaxy.
For as long as it took him to complete his degree, Mical stayed with the Fleet, and rendered what aid he could. He never saw any Jedi in the desolate places he walked; at war’s end, what few Jedi remained withdrew to their temple on Coruscant, and stayed there. These days, Mical was far more closely acquainted with Jedi out of history books than he was Jedi who lived and breathed.
He studied, and worked, and provided what healing he could, though he was just one man, utterly unequal to the task of healing the Rim. When Mical completed his degree work and could call himself a historian of the Republic, Mical left the service, and went to work in a university on a Rim world intact enough to still have a functioning university system. He worked, and applied himself to tasks he actually had hope of completing.
With the leisure time afforded him by no longer having worry about his possibly-imminent death every day, Mical had had more time to think about why the pattern of blame assigned to fallen Jedi no longer satisfied him. Those who cast blame pointed fingers (if they had fingers) everywhere but at themselves. Mical wasn’t certain of when it had happened, but somehow, self-reflection had become anathema to the Jedi.
Revan and Malak, Kun and Qel-Droma, those four paragons had all fallen to the Dark Side, apparently without warning. They weren’t the only ones, either. Mical had found tales of other paragons, lesser-known, who had also turned against the Jedi. The same judgment was applied to them: their fall was the fault of their teachers, or there was simply some innate weakness in them that had made them more susceptible to seduction.
That wasn’t good enough for Mical anymore. Perhaps there had been some ‘innate weakness’ in Revan and Malak, but that didn’t account for why so many fell with them, why so many Jedi—and so many Republic officers—had abandoned everything they had been taught to value to form a nascent Sith empire. They couldn’t all have shared this ‘innate weakness,’ could they? There had to be something else.
If it wasn’t the Jedi, then perhaps there was some flaw in what they had been taught. But it was statistically extremely unlikely that they had all had masters who were negligent, overly permissive, willfully blind. If the flaws were there, they went deeper, straight to the core of the Jedi’s teachings. The rot was in the heart of it all, the fallen Jedi merely symptoms of the sickness, and those remaining refusing to so much as contemplate that something might be wrong, if it meant that they had to look within themselves instead of writing off the fallen.
If Mical was still a Jedi, he could have, he could have moved to do something about it. Perhaps not now, when he was still so young, but when he was older, more experienced, more respected, he could have moved to cut the rot away, and find something healthy to replace it.
But he was not a Jedi, and never would be. From the outside, there was little Mical could do but read, research, critique, and pray that someone, somewhere, was listening.
-0-0-0-
In the years following the close of the Jedi Civil War, the Republic, despite all its efforts to rebuild, quietly inched closer and closer to collapse.
There were efforts being made by the Ithorians to prove that the planets razed by the Sith could be restored, with Telos as their test case. They had been making good progress, but now they were bogged down in disputes with Czerka Corporation, and progress on that front had ground to a screeching halt. If the Telosian restoration efforts failed, it seemed all too likely that the Senate would refuse to devote resources to restoring similarly-devastated worlds.
Unrest was brewing on Onderon, worrying enough on its own, but even more so in light of the fact that Onderon was the only real power left in Republic space on the Rim. The Queen was friendly to the Republic, but also growing more unpopular with each passing month. Her cousin and, more importantly, her heir, had the love of the people, and all but openly advocated for secession. Onderon seceding would be a disaster for the Republic. The professors at the university where Mical now worked felt that, at best, Onderon’s secession would only worsen the current recession; he’d heard a few of them speculating that it could potentially cause the Republic economy to collapse altogether.
And in the dark, something was moving.
The Temple on Coruscant sat empty and abandoned. The Jedi had vanished from it without giving any notice of where they had planned to go next. Reportedly, none of the Temples and Enclaves scattered across Republic space were occupied by Jedi. There had been no confirmed sightings of Jedi in over a year, and someone out of Nar Shaddaa had posted so large a bounty on live Jedi that anyone who turned one in could probably have bought their own moon.
A Miraluka colony world on the Rim had gone dark—and that was all Mical could determine with any certainty. No one knew what had happened to the residents, where they had gone, or if they were alive or dead. Up-to-date information was getting difficult to find in general on the Rim, but the fact that an entire planet just going dark and all its residents apparently vanishing into thin air hadn’t provoked a media firestorm was alarming, especially in what it implied.
There were whispered rumors of a ghost ship wandering the furthest reaches of the known galaxy. It was a late Mandalorian war-era capital ship, so badly damaged that it shouldn’t have been spaceworthy at all, and yet it sailed the darkness between the stars. It answered no hails, and eyewitnesses said there was something else about it: that staring at it was like staring at a rip in the fabric of the universe, something that ate the light around it. Those who stared at it for long enough began to hear a scream in the back of their minds.
And one day, Mical was summoned to the Republic ship the Sojourn, and ushered into an admiral’s office.
“Mical, isn’t it?” Admiral Onasi smiled at him, but the smile didn’t really reach his eyes. He had the thin, stretched look of a man who had fought too hard and too long to hold together something always threatening to break. “I’ve heard you served in the Republic Army during the Jedi Civil War.”
Mical nodded slowly. “Yes, Admiral. I was a field medic with the Infantry.”
“Not a safe job, was it?” There was a probing edge to the admiral’s voice, concealed (if not particularly well) beneath a conversational tone. “The Sith made a habit of picking off medics on the ground, or so I’ve heard.”
“None of us had any guarantee of safety on the ground,” Mical demurred. “Admiral, if I may ask…”
Admiral Onasi nodded firmly, and took two datapads into his hands. “If you are still willing to risk yourself serving the Republic, I’ve got a mission for you, Mical.”
Something was tugging at the back of Mical’s mind, urging him to pay close attention. When he thought about it, it might have been the Force. “I serve the Republic still, Admiral. What is the mission?”
“Good.” Though his face had not lost its thin, stretched look, Mical thought that the admiral seemed a little… lighter now. “Your mission is twofold. Your secondary objective is to head to certain Jedi sites along the Rim, looking for information as to what happened to the Jedi, where they might have gone.”
Mical’s brow furrowed. “Jedi sites?” And this was only the secondary objective, too.
“Yes. I know you’ve studied Jedi history—I’ve read some of your publications.” Under other circumstances, Mical thought he might have been flattered. Under this one, he was sensing an ‘and.’ Sure enough… “And you came recommended by someone who is aware of your history. You’re more likely to know what you’re looking for than anyone else I could send.”
Mical was tempted to ask just who it was that the admiral knew who was in the position to know about his ‘history.’ But it occurred to him that if the admiral was at all inclined to share, he would have done so already. And the prospect of being allowed access to Jedi Archives again was so appealing that it simply wouldn’t do to jeopardize it. “I believe I am up to the task.”
Admiral Onasi passed him one of the datapads he was holding. “Here is a list of sites and other mission specs. You will be given an allowance for travel expenses, though you’re probably gonna have a hard time finding lodgings near most of the sites on that list, so be ready to rough it. Now, as to your primary objective…” Admiral Onasi stared intently into Mical’s face as he explained. “There’s someone I want you to keep an eye out for when you’re visiting these sites. If you find her, try to convince her to let you travel with her. If she lets you, great. Don’t worry about your secondary objective in that case; the primary takes top priority.”
“Do you want me to… report on her actions? Admiral, I was never trained as a spy.”
Admiral Onasi held up a hand. “There’s a code for my personal comm in this—“ he held up the other datapad “—but I only want you reporting to me if you find her, and then if she’s doing anything that strikes you as alarming, or if something else happens that’s so urgent that you think I need to know about it. It’s more important that she be kept safe.
“Now, if you can’t convince her to let you travel with her, don’t force the issue. I don’t want her tipped off to the fact that the Fleet’s still looking for her; that could make her bolt, leave Republic space, and that’s the last thing I want.” He sighed slightly, ran a hand through his lightly graying hair. “Just try to figure out where she’s heading next, and if you can, report back to me with that.”
Whoever the person Admiral Onasi wanted to find was, the treatment he was applying to her was… odd. If she was a fugitive, Mical saw little reason why the admiral couldn’t simply get in touch with law enforcement agencies to apprehend her. If she wasn’t a fugitive, but she was still someone he wanted found, why not send a ship to intercept once he knew her location? The fleet might be spread too thin to send a ship chasing after a single person, but once they knew where she was…
But if such information was required for him to fulfill the mission, he likely would have been given it in the first place. “I will do my best to find her,” Mical said honestly, and hoped that second datapad contained enough information to make such a task at least marginally easier.
“Good. I’ll need you to leave as soon as possible, so when you get back to the university, begin making arrangements immediately.”
At that, Admiral Onasi handed Mical the second datapad. When Mical looked at the screen, he froze, his heart pounding.
A photograph, presumably that of the subject, had been brought up to the screen. She was a human woman, and though older and gaunter and more dull-eyed than Mical had ever seen her, he recognized her immediately. “I… I know her,” he said, uncertain of what else he could say. “I’ve met her before.”
“Have you?” The admiral’s smile reached his eyes now, but the light in his eyes was a soft, sad one. “Well, that should make things easier.”