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Elzar had heard in a story, once, rotations ago when he was young and dreaming in the soft muted tones of the temple’s creche, that a heart was a heavy burden.
He knew it to be true.
These past few days he’d thought of those Jedi who lived so completely apart from everyone, who barely seemed a part of the order at all. He thought of them, their efficiency, their cool relationships with their padawans and the Jedi they’d been raised alongside with. He thought of them so often — so frequently. If only he could be so lucky. (After everything, after all that had happened, after his own heart refused to stop bleeding.)
He didn’t know how the Jedi before him had done it. He didn’t know how his predecessors, the Jedi who’d fought and died in the wars that gave him the very peace he’d grown up in, how they moved on forward after burying their dead. Their family. Their philtatos .
He wondered if they, too, had had to live with the knowledge that their closest and dearest had fallen, drowned. He half hoped he didn’t either.
Elzar was drowning too. That was another truth.
The temple on Coruscant had a room rarely used, painted in pale blues and little silver stars, a window as tall as the walls and almost as wide facing east and the planet’s single sun. Kindly, it was called the Morning Room. Each new day rose on the walls of this room, the windows never facing the setting sun. The morning came here, every day, beginning but never ending on the Jedi that were mourned there.
It was hardly used, Elzar knew that, and for good reason. A Jedi should be cremated — ashes and smoke and bone joining the force where the spirit already lay. It was cruel to mourn a man who hadn’t been found, whose body lay at the bottom of Eiram’s deep, blue sea, forever fated to drown. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
Elzar was drowning. The blue of this peaceful room was pulling him under the waves of his very own ocean.
Their beacon had fallen, its marshal with it, the best of all men lost to the Jedi Order. Lost to Elzar. He should’ve been the one to die in his place.
“You’re in your own head again,” a voice said beside him.
Familiar— Too familiar— Elzar’s chest filled with the salted sea.
“I don’t know where else to be,” he replied.
Stellan stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, or near enough. Even here, now, he held a presence that Elzar was drawn to, all broad chested and taller than him since their days in the gentle creche.
“I know,” Stellan said. His voice scratched, cracked like a broken holocall. “You’ve always felt so much.”
He didn’t touch Elzar then, no firm hand on his shoulder like there should’ve been if this was any usual day. There was a galaxy between them, the width of a lightsaber hilt, and Elzar had never felt further from him. Stellan didn’t say anything else, then, standing silently. He still took up so much room in Elzar’s periphery— His thoughts— The ocean blue that now belonged to them both.
An older couple walked into the room, led by a faceless temple guard. The woman had her hair set in neat, dark curls, wearing a deep blue dress that likely cost more than what half the galaxy earned in a year. She was on the arm of a taller man, whose dark hair was more grey than deep brown. He also wore midnight blue, a gold brooch on his chest matched the necklace around his wife’s throat. Elzar could tell they had money, likely influence too; but nothing too powerful or wealthy, he assumed, he had never seen them beyond the familiarity in their grief-stricken faces.
They moved slowly around the room, hesitant and quiet. They listened to each Jedi that stopped them, nodded and murmured their thank yous, out of place and out of time.
“I don’t remember them,” Stellan spoke. His voice was in Elzar’s throat.
He was watching the couple, Elzar noticed, clouded distance in his eyes and his body something faded.
“They’re your parents,” Elzar said, more a statement than a question.
“I believe so.”
It was strange, he thought, to know that somewhere out in the wide open galaxy, there was a woman who’d loved him, carried him, had given him to the Jedi with the hope that it was for the best. There’d likely also been a father, who’d hopefully loved his mother. There were two people who might grieve for him without ever really knowing him, the same way Stellan’s parents grieved openly now.
Of course, not every child was given to the Order with so much grace, not every child was loved the way each one deserved. (But Elzar hoped, desired, needed, to believe that his mother thought about him more than once in a while.)
They’d stopped to speak to Avar and beside him, Stellan stiffened.
“What’s wrong?” Asked Elzar.
“Avar and I,” Stellan started, carefully, his tone that careful balance everyone had come to associate with the council member who served as the Jedi’s face. “Avar and I didn’t part on the best of terms.”
Elzar looked at him then, saw how his jaw clenched under his beard and something like regret in the laugh lines by his eyes.
“Ah… Starlight?”
“Starlight. I never said what I wanted to. I don’t think she did either. I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to settle whatever happened between us,” Stellan chuckled then, a little bitter. “Masterhood has a way of tearing even close friends apart.”
Elzar thought for a moment. Thought of all the times he wanted to reach out, to say what he wanted to say, to have his dearest ( his most beloved ) by his side while he trudged through the blackness that existed since Valo and Grizal.
“Yes,” he finally said. “It does.”
Avar had twisted the loops of her belt tie into a knot, her deft fingers still turning it even as she spoke in a hushed, appropriately respectful voice. Always trying to be the very best of the Jedi. Elzar wished he knew how to tell her that she didn’t have to be — that none of them had ever had to strive so hard it erased themselves.
Elzar wished he’d been able to tell Stellan that before he’d been made a master. Before the Republic made him the Jedi most palatable to the public eye.
He wasn’t sure Stellan was even truly here.
“Couldn’t you tell her?” He spoke again.
Stellan glanced at him, “Tell her what?”
“I don’t… know exactly,” something clenched in Elzar’s stomach. Fear, or worry, or something he didn’t yet know. “You said you needed to settle things, you can do it now can’t you?”
“Oh, Elzar… You know that’s not possible.”
Elzar didn’t want to think any further.
The couple were getting closer to Elzar, now, and the tightness in his stomach and chest began to choke him. Stellan’s fingers closed around his, cold. Where had the warmth Elzar remembered from the gold glow — the burning heights — of the childhood together in the creche gone? He was supposed to be a steady strength against the storm-bitter ocean, a landed coastline he could lean against. Stellan was the north star Elzar had always followed.
And he hadn’t— He wasn’t— He could’ve done so much more for him. He should’ve died in Stellan’s place.
The woman stood in front of him, the lines around her eyes the same as Stellen’s always were. She was looking at him, deep, her manicured nails clutching at the brooch that kept her cloak in place.
When she spoke, her voice was a deep contralto that reminded Elzar of every last time he spoke to his dearest friend.
“The Jedi,” she said, nodding towards Avar ever so slightly, refined to the tip of her well-bred nose. “Master Kriss. She said… you were close friends with Stellan.”
“Yes, we grew up together,” he managed to say.
“I see… I hope…” she cleared her throat. “I hope he was very loved.”
He felt Stellan squeeze his hand. He found there was something comforting in the cold of a man under the very waves he knew so well.
“Tell her,” Stellan whispered. “Tell her I remember.”
But wouldn’t that be lying? Was all Elzar could think, staring into her warm brown eyes. She’d lost the same child twice over, had to say goodbye two times to the son she’d never get to know; would it be right at all to lie?
“It’d be a kindness, El. For me.”
And so he told her. He told her of her son, strong Stellan who held more kindness in his being than most did in the palms of their hands. He told her that Stellan remembered her and his father. They were a distant memory, locked away in the mind of a youngling (then a padawan, a knight, a master), hidden until he needed something to warm him on long, lonely missions away from the temple that loved him so.
“We saw him on the holonet,” Stellan’s mother said, after Elzar finished. Her eyes were the colour of fresh rain on earth. “He was so brave… Our brave boy. He’ll always be our boy.”
Beside him, Stellan drew a sharp breath.
“He was brave until the end,” Elzar whispered, trying to hold on tighter to Stellan’s fading hand.
Stellan’s father spoke then, his own voice as raw as the parents who’d lost their children on Valo. Elzar knew this grief.
“Was he a good man?”
Elzar thought, knew the answer better than he knew anything else, and Stellan’s hand brushed his one final time.
“He was the best of us all.”