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Language:
English
Series:
Part 5 of The 2020 Files
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Published:
2024-11-21
Words:
337
Chapters:
1/1
Hits:
27

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Summary:

For about 12 years now, a Stars Wars TTRPG has been running (I've sat at the table for about 10 years now, allowing for COVID interruption). This is a fic written about something from our third campaign (some sourced from the Force and Destiny book, but the campaign itself was called Dawn of the Force). Krissen was the character I played in this campaign, and he was a member of the Knights of the Dawn and their erstwhile leader (I won a dice roll). Our opponents were a group of Sith known as The Seven.

Notes:

It's hard to know how to preface this with the appropriate context but here goes.

Astor was a Jedi who survived Order 66 (cliche I know, but when your friends all decide to sacrifice themselves to the saber of Anakin Skywalker to give you time to get out of the Jedi Temple, you kinda have to do it) and he fled Coruscant with his lover, Kithenia. Together they made a life for themselves in the Outer Rim until one day, their past came back to haunt them and the Empire stole their young son, Krissen. With the help of some Mandalores, they storm the facility where their son is being kept and they liberate him. Astor dies in the attempt. A little over 40 years later, Krissen meets the others (Sere Phaux, Ekans, Heda, Gallowglass, and Kiaran; a little ways down the road, we pick up our seventh member, Elderyn) on Spintir, drawn there by some mysterious purpose.

Once on Spintir, our band of misfits who are still barely speaking to each other in full sentences rob a museum and let loose onto the galaxy a person who has the potential to destroy everything, the leader of The Seven, the Red Sith, Nox. Once out, Nox makes the galaxy her playground and gathers to her the rest of the Seven: Ciber, Indelis, Exaltus, Nihlus, Raptus, and Furor).

What followed was five years of a war waged across the galaxy, the Knights of the Dawn and the Republic versus The Seven. One of our more memorable clashes happened on Bespin. We were there to steal a Sith dreadnought, right out from under Nox; but, due to bad rolls and the most bizarre trouble with hallways and a complete inability to be stealthy when the moment calls for it, Krissen eventually had enough and yeeted himself and Gallowglass off of the dreadnought and back down to Cloud City. Unfortunately, it was a frying pan to fire situation as Krissen then found himself in a one v. one duel with Indelis.

The hate-boner Indelis has for his clone is unmatched. Due to an unfortunate close encounter with two thermal detonators and a despair on a roll, Krissen had lost an arm several months prior to this duel and had replaced the missing arm with a prosthetic. When he and Indelis faced each other again, Krissen found that Indelis couldn't bear not to match his clone and had severed his own arm off and replaced it with a prosthetic as well. So, Krissen took his other arm in that fight.

Towards the end of the campaign, the Knights of the Dawn found themselves on Manaan, and Krissen wound up in the most distasteful of situations: having to imitate Indelis. This meant, of course, that Krissen had to cut off his remaining arm and put a prosthetic there to match his originator. (If I one day write the entirety of the campaigns that we've played, please just know that this barely even registers as unhinged behavior).

The following fic is just some introspection about all that.

If you've made it to the fic after that bit of longwindedness, you're a trooper and I salute you.

Work Text:

The light in the fresher was garishly bright, fluorescing against the red in the false skin that shimmered over him in holographic ripples as he moved. It would settle, in time, but right now the sight of it was slightly nauseating and his natural coloration would occasionally break through and clash with the disguise.

Krissen stood before the mirror, a stranger to himself, recognizing the horns on his head and his eyes, and little else.

But even his eyes were strange these days, like someone else was looking out through them.

The silvering of the mirror seemed to heighten the effect and for a moment, Krissen was gone and in his place was Indelis, and it was Indelis’ eyes, the blue and purple peering into the silvered surface, their gaze hard and merciless.

When he’d learned that Indelis had taken his own arm off and replaced it with a prosthesis to match Krissen, he’d shuddered. A mutilated, doubled life and living mirror image that sneered and snapped and bit and clawed at him.

That Krissen had taken Indelis’ other arm in their battle on Bespin had been something like prophecy, or was it wish fulfillment? A desire to see the other as different from himself because in the time since, he’d found out that he was the clone and not the original, he’d been losing his grip on the self at the core of his being.  

The heart is the blade of the Jedi, Krissen reminded himself, the Force is the blade of the heart. I am me, not he.

But the willing removal of right arm to match Indelis tasted like ashes and abnegation.

As he gazed at this facsimile of his Sith double, settled over his body, mapped to his physical being, Krissen wondered if there really was a difference between them, or if was only ever going to be a matter of time before they became the same person, paradoxically inhabiting the same space, until one of them finally succeeded in killing the other.  

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