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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
—Rumi
You make all of your decisions twice.
The council tells you to walk away, so you keep walking. They have seen your true face now, the back of your head, and you say goodbye to no one before you leave. The same way you told no one before you left to fight in Revan’s war because you thought you were doing something right. This time you know you are not. You cut your hair short with the first blade you’ve held in years that is not a lightsaber and think of all the things you will never do again. You wonder if you will miss them. If you do, you can’t feel it. The end of Revan’s war took everything, even that, and left only echoes: the scar on your stomach from the Mandalorian in red, battered armor, wielding that bitter-edged vibroblade on Dxun. The hole in your chest where the Force used to be, as if someone has punched through your heart, and you tell yourself it is because you have chosen not to use it any longer but you know it is not.
You let yourself forget. Memories are echoes too, and you do your best to leave them behind. Bury them in the dirt on Dantooine right before you leave it, the rolling plains, the low sweeping sky. Let it burn, you think; let it burn, and remember giving the order at Malachor V.
No one follows you into exile; no one has ever followed you. That was Revan’s way, Revan’s methods. When you hear two years later that she has died, you think that now you will never know. (Which of the questions you have left is the one that you mean?) Malak killed her, they say; you don’t ask more about it, never find out any more about it. Years pass and Revan is dead and the war should be over, yet for you it never is.
You do not see Revan again after your exile. You last saw her in the weeks before Malchor V, the weeks right before the war's end. She was not there at the planet when you made your decision for the first time. She is not there in the end, either, at the last time; in these hardest moments, these loneliest places, you have always been alone. And that is the one singular way, you think, that you and Revan have ever been alike. Even after her fall.
She sent you to Malachor V to die. You know this; it is why all of you were sent. That you did not die is an accident. That you walked away afterwards is an anomaly: outside the parameters of expected outcomes. Maybe that was why Revan did not call you back. Maybe she wanted to see what you would do.
-
Kolto is supposed to heal all wounds and leave only the most minor of scars, but it has never worked for you that well. A patchwork of scars webs all over your body, and when you wake up on Peragus you have new ones, healed poorly, new pink skin around the narrow points of your wrists. You think you remember being drugged, being dragged down, being bound, but maybe not: maybe that is an older memory. Scars open and reseal, after all.
After Dxun, after Serreco (entire cities turned to glass—!), you wondered about this. You heal no faster than anyone around you, heal worse even, but when countless others die you do not, so perhaps there is a cost paid, there: a balance maintained.
“The Force be with you,” Revan said before you left for Malachor. You wonder now if she meant it; if she ever believed. The Force be with you, she said; but afterwards it wasn’t, and perhaps that was her true intention after all.
The mass shadow generator was Revan’s idea, Revan’s project. She never told you to use it—just that you could. It was always your decision in the end.
-
Atton is a problem. He expects too much and thinks you are someone you’re not. Of course, you think when you find out what he did: that he followed Revan’s orders long after you had turned aside. Atton wants you to forgive him, because if you can forgive him he will feel redeemed. But you don’t want to forgive him. Forgiveness is a finite resource and there is only so much that you have left within yourself, and you need to save it. There is something worse drawing near, you know; there will be worse to come in the galaxy than the past actions of Atton Rand, there always has been, and you will have to bear witness to it before it is over.
He tells you about the woman he butchered and murdered and how she tried to save him from himself, and in sideways terms he asks you to do the same thing—to give him the same offer that this nameless, long-dead Jedi woman once gave him and that he so violently refused.
You are piecing yourself together, slowly. The Force was so quiet for so long, an unbearable unceasing silence in a place where the sound of ocean waves once swelled. Now there is the distant sound of the shore, and you are swimming towards it. Atton wants you to drag him there with you. You have never been a teacher; never had a Padawan; never wanted one, either.
But: “I could show you what she saw in you,” you tell him. Every decision twice.
“Go to hell,” Atton says, and leaves, and holes himself up in the cockpit, and you let him because he is angry that you saw through him, that you know and still have not offered him any comfort against his past. No one has ever done the same for you—no one has ever tried to lift the weight of the things you’ve done off your shoulders.
It would be a death, in a way, to separate yourself from those things. An untruthfulness. What was it that Kreia said, on Korriban? That Revan had not been redeemed when the Jedi Council took her mind: because she had never fallen. There is no fall, no redemption. There is only the path.
-
Telos reminds you of Dantooine. You have not been back to that planet where you trained and lived for over a decade in all the years of your exile, and Telos is so fractured, so broken, so far from whole that it is hard to think how it could remind you of anything, but it does. Malak bombed Dantooine in the last days of the civil war. Perhaps it really isn’t so different from Telos, now.
The Iridonian mechanic should be familiar to you but he isn’t. He calls you by name, calls you General, and you think of several things at once: falling into the planet core, at Malachor; the way it wasn’t Revan there in the end but you; how, in the years that followed, you made yourself forget it all.
You have been wandering the galaxy alone for a long time. Kreia and Atton are hardly warm company. Bao-Dur is quiet and unassuming and competent, and he follows you to the polar caps and then to the Ebon Hawk and then off-planet, and you see Kreia begin to wonder, the disdain in her perception. But you never even once question whether Bao-Dur will come with you, and that surprises you; somehow, you had not known.
-
Kreia never refers to Visas by her name: always ‘the Miraluka,’ always ‘the slave.’ It grates at you more than the omission of your own name. (Always ‘the exile.’)
“Doesn’t it bother you?” you ask Visas once while the two of you are meditating. You have destroyed her lightsaber and now she fights with twin swords, two vibroblades. They hover in the air before her, weightless, her hands palm upwards on her knees as she sits cross-legged. You have stopped meditating and are watching her.
“You will have to specify,” Visas says.
“Kreia. The things she calls you.”
“Your master and I rarely cross paths.” Visas’ voice is tempered, patient. “And why should what she says bother me, if it is true? I am a slave.”
“Not anymore.”
The quirk of Visas’ mouth is a shock to you; you have never before seen her react so strongly to anything that you have ever said.
“Something often said, by people who have never been slaves,” Visas says. "Showing just how little they understand.” And you fall silent, chastised, but uncertain fully of what she means.
Visas is more comforting than she should be. After you make your lightsaber and find the pieces to construct another, you give them to her, and she does not ask for assistance as she assembles a new weapon at the workbench. Bao-Dur watches and says nothing.
“I require a focus crystal,” Visas says quietly when she has finished. You hand it to her: a small purple stone. She holds it in her hands for a moment, silent.
“You are certain?” she asks, and you wonder whether her hesitation is fear or passivity or neither.
Every decision twice, you think, and wonder at the way you force those around you to do the same.
“I am,” you tell her, and watch as Visas puts the crystal into place. In truth she is your first student, but neither of you will ever mention it, ever acknowledge it.
-
Kreia, ever cryptic. Kreia, in your head even when you have learned to shut everything else out. She keeps you alive but you don’t consider this a favor; she keeps you alive but you know, already, that even if she loves you that will not save you.
-
“Why did you come with us?” you ask Bao-Dur one day, when there is no one around and you are in the cargo hold tinkering with your lightsaber. He has his back to you as he repairs the ship. You realize you are the only one he ever turns his back to. There is a silence while he tilts his head, and you wonder if you made a mistake.
“Because of you,” he says after a moment; “I should think that was obvious.”
You mull this over as the days pass. It makes sense, but it doesn’t. You understand him, but you don’t. You don’t know what to call it. You want to apologize for making him set off the generator but that feels cheap, useless. You could have done it yourself. You were right there, and it was simple. You gave the order; there was no reason why someone else had to be the one to flip the switch.
-
Sometimes the crew sets up a hand-to-hand ring in the hold and you test each other. Mira is pretty good, and takes Atton out when he gets too handsy, which is nearly always, so he nearly always takes an elbow to the eye with good humor. Visas only observes, and Mandalore is disinterested (though he watches Mira fight like he sees her training, knows how she was raised), and most of the matches do not last long, but whenever you get in the ring, the matches are always drawn out. You with your forearm across Mira’s throat, pinning her down, looking down into the bright defiant flash of her eyes before she flips you off her. Atton with blood dripping from his nose, wiping it away with the back of his hand before he comes at you again. Bao-Dur, with one arm, his prosthetic turned off for the bout (he turns it off more often than not, more often than you would have expected), his lip split, and your ears are ringing, and when you are done you do not know who won.
You know what this means; of course you know what it means. It’s what the prospective padawans did at the academy before their masters chose them. It means you’re connected. It means you’re bonded. You don’t know how it happened, how you could be connected to all these people so intensely. Kreia will not talk to you about it, and she is just another piece of the problem, isn’t she? Your bond with her so strong, so powerful, that if one of you were to die the other would follow.
It’s not just Atton you could teach, you realize. It’s all of them.
Visas is already trained but she is lost, and you know how to wander in the dark, pathless. You take her hand and show her the way forward. Mira is angry and short-tempered and outspoken and everything that you are not, but she is more pure of heart than you have ever known, ever could have guessed. When you take her back to Nar Shaddaa she falls to her knees in the middle of the city, weeping, when you show her how to listen with the Force for the first time.
“All these people,” she says, and can say nothing more.
“I know,” you tell her, and show her how to bring back the silence.
And Bao-Dur: of course, Bao-Dur. This has been a long time coming, you think. You hear him again, his voice in your head. I should think that was obvious.
“You are a good teacher,” Visas says to you some time after you have begun to instruct them all. You say nothing in response. You know that you are not—that something else is at work here that you do not understand. Something important that you are missing.
Visas never needed you to teach her about pain. Bao-Dur, too, is—(deadened, the voice in your head whispers)—familiar with pain’s eddies and flows, the way it stops and starts. Atton is selfish and that makes him lucky, but still he needs no lesson from you on suffering. Everything Mira needed to know she already learned at Malachor, where it all began.
Kreia does not approve. But then again there is little, you have found, of which Kreia does approve.
You make all of your decisions twice. All the ones that matter. Even the ones you made wrong.
-
When you dream about Revan, she is nothing like the woman you knew, the leader you followed. She is quieter and more withdrawn and her smiles come, not sincere and biting, but quietly and with bitterness. You wonder where she learned that: subtlety. She never had an ounce of it before.
You dream you are standing on the plains of Khoonda, watching the sun set over the horizon, several brith catching the last of the light as they gently soar through the sky above you. Revan is there in her full armor, looking pensive, looking annoyed. She is not wearing her mask but holding it by her fingertips in one hand, as if she wants to put it on and cannot. During the war you rarely saw her without it.
She is looking towards the ruins of the enclave. Her eyes are dark and featureless, her mouth turned down just at the corners, just slightly. In reality, you never knew when Revan was lying—you were never able to tell. But in the dream, in the vision, whatever it is, you know for the first time that she is; that what she says is not the truth.
She turns to you and smiles. Her face so still, so controlled, that she may as well have had the mask in place. “I’ve always hated this place,” she says, and the vision falls apart.
In the cave on Korriban, she does not speak. Just draws her lightsabers: one red, one purple. When she comes at you with them, you think, finally. You have been waiting for this for ten years. This is what should have happened. This is how it should have ended. You are disappointed when you defeat her, when the vision breaks.
-
After Dantooine; after the council: you, on your knees in the crew quarters. Trying to see, to understand; something you have always struggled to do. Bao-Dur, approaching quietly.
“Did you know?” you ask him, because you didn’t, and you don’t know how that could have been possible.
“Yes,” he says. A pang of anger, of frustration, of uselessness. “But not consciously. I could not have voiced it until the council did. It was something I knew but did not know that I knew.”
You laugh shortly, angry and self-hating. “I never knew. I forgot all that I knew. I thought everything that happened to me was because of what they did, not what I did.”
Silence. Patience. Bao-Dur, waiting it out.
“Have I been influencing you?” you ask at last. “All of you—without realizing.” Destroying you without even knowing it.
“Influencing, yes,” Bao-Dur says. “I cannot deny that, General. Your command echoes still.”
You hate him for it. You love him for it. “I’m empty,” you tell him. “All the way through. And I’m using you all to try and fill that wound inside of me.”
“Maybe,” Bao-Dur says. Behind him, Visas appears silently in the doorway, and Mira. “But it was our choice to follow.”
You wonder if he knows, even then, that this is not true. Now that you understand (at least in pieces) you can learn to control (in pieces) and make better (in pieces).
But first, Kreia. First, the end. First, Malachor V again.
And with you stands the last of the Jedi.
-
(Later: limping away from the Trayus Core, waiting for the mass shadow generator to start its work at any moment. You had to face Kreia alone but nothing afterwards was certain; there was never the assumption that you would make it off the planet alive, and you were at peace with that. But then Bao-Dur is there: standing in front of you, waiting.
“I told you to get everyone to the ship,” you tell him. “I told you to follow orders.”
“For once, General,” Bao-Dur says quietly, “you will have to suffer my insubordination.”)
-
Everything in twos; everything paired. Mistakes and all the lessons you didn’t learn. All the lessons you learned all too well. You do everything twice: train in the Force; leave the Jedi behind; the end at Malachor V. When you return to Malachor, your crew is with you. When you return to Malachor, you are planning again to destroy it.
There is a hole in the fabric of things here: spacetime itself torn apart by what you did more than ten years ago. For a decade the echo has lingered here, screaming into the hollowness of the space around it. It is time to put it to rest. It is time to cover up the wound and let it scar over, painfully, brokenly, the way all your scars have ever healed. You have carried Malachor’s echo all this way: all over the galaxy, a hollow place in your heart and mind where once your soul was supposed to be.
Did you know that Malachor had been beautiful, once? You think someone must have told you. Now it is shadows; now it is a graveyard, the corpses not interred but left behind as echoes on the planet’s surface, like fingerprints.
There is no fixing Malachor V. There is no silencing it. There is no making amends for what you have wrought. There is only an ending. You must repeat your mistakes in order to move past them. A painful truth. The Force, the galaxy, is not kind.
The first time you severed your connection to the Force, you had not even known that you had done it. You thought that it had been done to you—imposed. The second time, you know better. You let your connection to it, to this life you have lived, slowly fade. And you watch as the others’—Atton’s, Bao-Dur’s, Mira’s, Visas’—connections slowly strengthen. All this time, you have been using them. All this time, you have been only pretending. All this time, you have been a siphon, a leech. It is time to let go—to accept that Malachor V was the end of you as you were just as it had been the end of the war and the end of the Mandalorians. Kreia may have been right about the council—but the council had not been wholly wrong about you.
Revan sent you to Malachor to die. For once, a mistake on her part. Dying is yet another thing that you have never managed to get right.
You make all of your decisions twice.
One more time, you tell yourself. This time, with feeling.