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I.
She laughed now and again, bitterly, remembering how she used to be driven nearly to hair-pulling exasperation at Carth’s bristling and paranoid questioning at the slightest hint that he wasn’t getting the whole story. When she learned the reasons for it, she thought she understood, thought she could grasp what could cause a person to trust so little.
She laughed now and again in a way that made Bastila shudder, a fear pinging the edge of her mind, never daring to fully reveal itself.
“You know, I never realized until now. I mean, I suppose I realized, but I never really thought about it…”
“What?” Bastila asked, eyes not leaving the datapad in her hand, though they no longer registered the words on the screen.
"My name. Curelia Dansill, it’s just a name the Council gave me, far from anything I might associate with my old life, I assume. Revan, from ‘revanchist,’ I…took the name on, during the War, and kept it when, well…later. But my name from before I was Revan, when I was just—”
Me. The word caught in her throat and died as a strange panic fluttered at the edges of her vision.
"I…I don’t know my name.” The laughter had dried out now, crushed by the weight of the unknowing. Bastila said nothing, but looked up, tossing the datapad aside. Curelia sat perched on the edge of the settee, her crooked, mirthless smile and shining brown eyes seeming to bore into Bastila’s face.
In moments like these, neither needed to speak, not really. Their bond at times made one woman’s emotions indistinguishable from the other’s. But trust was something beyond Force bonds, beyond simply sharing that heart space.
The words were there, unspoken: Of course I will tell you anything I know, I will help you find the answers you seek, you have but to ask. Ask….
"No, that’s not right, is it?” Curelia said at last, reaching out to clasp Bastila’s hand, false smile softening to something akin to acceptance. “I don’t know her name.”
"Would you like to?”
"No. Yes. Not yet. I…she deserves to be remembered. She needs to be remembered, I just…”
"You are,” Bastila murmured, leaning forward to rest her free hand on Curelia’s shoulder, “real. This is real. Never doubt that.”
She stroked lightly with her thumb where the curve of Curelia’s neck met her shoulder and the muscles seemed to release the slightest bit of tension. A true smile, now, flickered into being, and she leaned forward, pressing a kiss into Bastila’s hair.
"What does a name measure, anyway?” Revan said.
II.
“You started down the path to the Dark Side the moment you defied the Council. What happened at Malachor was only proof of just how far you had fallen. Are you really so arrogant you believe the Council, all Jedi, did not feel the echoes? The deaths you caused? The deaths that came in the war which followed?”
The words reached Roshai through a fog of unreality. It was as if she stood before the Council once again, moving and speaking automatically, so far from any sense of herself the events of the day do not seem to have happened to her. It was almost amusing to picture what Atris must think of her exile, spent wallowing in the power of the Dark Side, cackling maniacally and leaving trails of blood and ruin in her wake. The reality entailed less cackling and a great deal more Juma.
Atris looked as though she expected a response rather than an avoidant gaze and an awkward silence. Roshai drew a shaky breath and raised her eyes to meet Atris’s. “You…talk like I have taken no responsibility for my actions, as if I don’t feel the weight of Malachor in every step, every day I continue to breathe–”
“And even now, you allow your emotions to control you.”
It was not an observation which required Jedi training. Roshai could feel her nails biting into the palms of her hands. But she was no longer a Jedi, and “no emotion, only peace” had long since become a laughable notion.
“You think I am…am arrogant? Do you really believe you could have stayed true to the Code in the face of such mindless destruction?”
“Destruction you caused! That you set into motion in your refusal to listen–”
“I felt the world dying around me, Atris.” The words echoed in the stark, white chamber. When she spoke again, her voice was a deadly hush. “I felt it…long before I made that call. We were all sent to Malachor to die, every last one of us. Innocents, ch…children, soldiers, friends, enemies: they were all the same, all burning and crying out for an end. I did the only thing I could do, the only thing Revan–” She faltered. She always would. But no amount of rage or screaming indignant regret would let her shift that burden.
“No,” she said, the tremor in her voice beginning to disappear. “I…I left an unbearable silence where moments before there had been an unbearable chaos of suffering.”
Atris opened her mouth to speak. Roshai tilted her head slightly and raised a palm in the air, and Atris, miraculously, remained silent.
“What I did was unforgivable,” she said, the shaking having ceased completely “I accept that, and I carry that. If it makes it easier for you to believe I ‘fell,’ that I was seduced by power and bloodlust and the allure of Sith teachings, that only a monster can commit monstrous acts, then by all means. Tell yourself that. That I am a fallen Jedi, an irredeemable creature of the Dark Side. But don’t you dare pretend to know, to even come close to understanding, what happened on Malachor. What it meant for…” Then, almost inaudibly, “What it means for the survivors.”
She turned to leave, stopping after a few steps to say, without looking back, “I will not stand here and whip myself for your satisfaction, Atris. It will not raise the dead.”
III.
“I don’t know if Kreia thought she could conceal it from me, or if she simply doubted I would know the significance.”
The Mandalorian looked up from the weapons workbench to see Roshai leaning against a storage locker, arms folded and shoulders hunched. He thought she looked strangely childlike and vulnerable just then, as she sometimes did, when she thought no one could see. And he wondered, not for the first time, if the vulnerability masked the unstoppable warrior, or the other way around.
“Can it with the vague Jedi crap. You have something to say, say it.”
“Canderous Ordo. Your name. Before the title, I mean.”
He stiffened at the sound of the name.
“Yeah? And?”
“You…knew her. After.” Her eyes seemed to bore through his mask, but her expression was pained. Pleading, almost.
He sighed. He had expected questions about her whereabouts, her mission, the same questions that woke him at night, teeth clenched and sweat on his brow, a dull ache in his chest. But this?
“There’s nothing I can tell you that you want to hear, kid.” He stopped short, thankful for the mask, but Roshai didn’t even raise a brow at the diminutive. She simply continued to look at him, that awful expression on her face. “You want the ‘why.’ But sometimes you gotta be satisfied with the ‘what’ and just move on. Now if you’re done, I’ve got work to do here.”
Roshai stood up straight, hardened and unreachable again. On the battlefield, she lacked the finesse he was accustomed to seeing in Jedi, dancing along a stage of corpses, but she possessed the tenacity and resourcefulness that marked a true survivor. One who knows when to retreat.
When she stepped into the hallway he called out for her to wait.
“The person you’re looking for may not exist anymore.”
“Of course. She could be dead,” she said before swiftly heading back toward the bridge.
Canderous went back to the process of adjusting his scope.
“Death is relative,” he muttered
IV.
What was left on Korriban besides fragments of memory? Silhouettes traced on stone walls and covered in layers of dust? The archaeological digs had themselves become relics of half-told stories.
You can’t heal what was never alive to harm in the first place. Roshai had stepped into the cave with the same sense of inevitability that had followed her since she left that damned kolto tank on Peragus.
If all of her paths, every choice, led to Malachor, then so, too, would they lead to Revan.
When she faced her fellow eager Jedi again, and they asked, “Will you follow,” she replied, head high:
“Regret is pointless.”
When she faced the soldiers she’d failed, faces flickering in and out of sight, she pressed the back of her hand to her face as if to wipe the persistent Dxun rain from her eyes.
“Would it matter?” she asked.
When she stared down at her friends’ blood, pooling on the floor and seeping into her palms like a toxin, their bodies lingering just long enough for the bile of panic to rise in her throat, she repeated:
“Apathy is death.”
She would know Revan with her back turned like she would know her from an eye-corner glance across the room, even when she could no longer feel the Force.
She reached for the words she would repeat to herself during the early years of her exile, when the memories would come rushing, unpredictably and shrieking into her waking mind, but they slipped away as Revan turned to face her.
She was as she remembered her from the days before the war: brown, freckled skin glistening slightly with post-sparring sweat and a smirk on her face. She bent to pick something up. A mask, flecked with blood and muck.
When she arose again Revan’s face was set with the same terrible resolve she had worn until—
Slowly, she donned the mask. Slowly, she reached for her lightsaber.
I will not ask why.
I will not ask why.
I will not ask why.
The cold, damp cave air on Roshai’s arms felt like the first real sensation she’d experienced in hours. Pain which had been so searing, so real, a moment ago, vanished.
“I am sorry you never woke from your nightmare,” Roshai said, lunging forward.