Retrace
o.O.o
A/N: Yes, it's yet another Revan-remembers fic. Whoops? Nah, I regret nothing. :)
A few things, in the interest of full disclosure:
1) This is not a straight retelling. I'm playing fast and loose with canon dialogue and game mechanics in addition to the backstory/history and metaphysics of the Star Wars universe.
2) I am not a fan of the Jedi Order. I'm not setting out to bash them, but I won't hesitate to call it like I see it—and I do not see them as necessarily right or good.
3) In fact, I am not a fan of the entire alignment system, in-game or out. Black-and-white morality is too clean and neat. I like me some ambiguity! Yay! So that's what you're getting.
4) Any and all ships contained herein will be very, very slow-burn.
Content warning for canon-typical violence, although there will be more Star Warsy badness (brainwashing, torture, mentions of genocide, etc.) as the story continues.
Enjoy, and may the Force be with you. :)
Chapter 1: Convergence
In which timelines shift, the Force protests, an elevator shaft is grievously misused, and Revan sees double.
o.O.o
In the raw instant before the blast hits, Revan gathers her power and jumps. The shockwave from the explosion not two meters from where she was standing slams into her back, sends her cannoning into the last survivor of the Jedi task force sent to kill her. The Jedi's lightsaber is knocked from her hand and goes spinning away—and then it's a mad rush of air and sound and fire as the bridge of the Crusader vomits atmosphere into the void of space.
Revan gives a sharp Force push to propel herself away from the gaping hole in the hull. One of the navigators' stations rears up before her. She seizes the armrest, and the Jedi—Bastila Shan, so-called Hope of the Republic—manages to cling to Revan's robe.
The howling chokes off as the emergency O2 shields activate, and the Crusader's flagging life support system frantically pumps air back onto the bridge. Revan lets go, twists around, kicks the Jedi away as she springs to her feet. She still has one of her lightsabers. Shan has nothing. No weapons, no allies, no Master.
"Surrender and I may show mercy," Revan says, more on principle than out of any real expectation.
Shan picks herself up, fists clenched at her sides, eyes blazing. "I'll never surrender to the likes of you," she spits out. Of course.
The ship groans and buckles as another salvo from the Leviathan hammers at its port side. Revan seeks out the lives of her crew, pinpricks of light in the Force. They flicker out by the dozens as air vents from the tortured vessel. And in the distance, a hateful presence is laughing in satisfaction, watching the ship burn. Waiting for her to burn with it.
"Traitorous wretch," Revan says. "If this is how he hopes to gain command of the Sith—"
"The dark side will always consume itself!" Shan shouts over a deafening burst of laser fire.
"And you with it, it seems," she says. She flicks her wrist, and Shan is thrown to the side, pinned against a monitor bank with a mere thought. Revan activates the nav station, accesses the systems status reports even as she makes a rough count of survivors through the Force. There are less than fifty crew left alive on board. Fifty and dropping, out of an original complement of hundreds.
She will extract the cost of their lives out of Malak's miserable hide.
But first, she must find a way off the Crusader before it crumbles around her. The escape pod banks were some of the first areas targeted after weapons and shields, but there are a few left intact. If she can reach them.
There's no choice but to try, really. She opens ship-wide communications. "Attention all stations," she says. "Escape pods in the aft starboard section remain operational. Make your way there and jettison immediately." Hopefully that will get everyone who is able moving in the right direction. These are her best and brightest, the most loyal of her people. She would hate to lose any more of them to Malak's treachery.
The bridge shudders, and the shimmering O2 shields flicker. Ominous. Revan turns to consider Shan as their time drains away. She is strong in the Force, perhaps even at Malak's level—or she could be, with time. Her Battle Meditation has caused far more trouble for Revan's fleet than first expected. And she has a brittleness to her, hairline fractures that, with the right pressure, might one day shatter. Excellent.
Revan gestures, and Shan is wrenched from the monitor bank to sprawl in an ungainly heap at her feet. Shan gasps, struggling to rise, a ferocious scowl on her fine-featured face.
Revan grabs the collar of her robes and hauls her upright, then starts dragging her to the turbolifts.
"Let go of me!" Shan yells, writhing and kicking ineffectually. Ah, the advantages of proper armor. The Mandalorians got that right, at least.
"Do you want to die here, Jedi?" Revan asks in mild tones. "Because that is easy enough to arrange. If, on the other hand, you'd rather live to irritate me another day, either stop struggling or start walking."
Shan digs her heels in. And slides, because her boots lack adequate traction and the floor is solid, polished durasteel. Honestly. "What will you do with me?" she says, voice shaking.
"That," says Revan, "is entirely dependent upon whether or not we survive long enough to reach an escape pod."
"You either break your prisoners or kill them if they will not break."
"True. But perhaps you should be more concerned with more immediate threats to your life. I am actually starting to like you. Malak's turbolasers most certainly do not."
Shan blanches, but doesn't resist when Revan tugs her to the lift shaft and blasts the doors open with a wave of Force energy. Revan peers down—it's a long way from the command deck to the aft starboard pod bay, but thankfully it's mostly vertical.
In an effort to minimize the possibility of horrible splattering death in the event of malfunction, the repulsorlift generators are not attached to the elevator box itself. Instead, they are spaced every three floors, their influence extending far enough above to keep the lift hovering at the appropriate level, while providing redundant safeguards against falling. If a generator fails and the lift accelerates past a certain velocity, all repulsors below it will automatically activate with increasing intensity, and the lift will be brought to a safe—if somewhat jarring—halt.
"Repulsorlift cushions?" says Shan, drawing in a deep breath. She looks a bit green. Not a fan of heights, then.
"You read my mind," Revan says, smirking behind her mask.
She takes the Jedi by the hand, and together, they dive into the shaft.
They fall, the wind of their passage snapping the edges of Revan's cloak. Faster and faster, until the sensors register the danger and thirty feet below, the generator light blinks green. Revan braces herself as they smack into a billowing wall of force that slows their descent appreciably. Another cushion, and another—her teeth ache from the repeated impacts, but she isn't too worried.
Until, that is, Malak's assault takes out the Crusader's main power generators.
Life support, the O2 shields, and gravity are powered by the backup generators, but everything else shuts down. Including, incidentally, the elevators' safety measures.
Revan curses as a horrible splattering death looms in the near future. Shan, though, sweeps an arm around, shoves at the wall to propel them sideways.
They smash into the opposite wall, Revan's head smacking against an outthrust coolant pipe with a ring of metal on metal; the breath is crushed out of her by the force of the impact, and stars explode across her vision. But she reaches out, left hand tight around Shan's, right hand scrabbling desperately for purchase—
Her fingers snag on a nest of conduits. She surges the Force through her entire limb to strengthen it as her own weight, and Shan's, and their combined momentum, turn her shoulder into a block of white-hot agony.
She breathes shallowly through her teeth, ribs aching with every inhalation. Bruised, probably cracked, possibly broken. At least they're not falling anymore.
"Door," she grunts.
Below her, Shan gestures, and the door below them hisses open. Shan swings through the portal. Revan follows more slowly, clambering down the conduit line until she's close enough to make the drop. She staggers the landing, drops to her knees. Her ribs, her skull, her shoulders—she wants nothing more than to curl up here and wait for the pain to stop.
There's a snap-hiss of a lightsaber igniting. Hers; it's red. And Shan has it. No, two—where did she get two red lightsabers when Revan lost one of them? Furthermore, why are there two Shans? It makes no sense—this will be among the most ignominious deaths of any Sith Lord in recorded history, death by traitorous apprentice and elevator shaft and ungrateful double Jedi—
She sets her jaw and sinks into the Force, feeding the fires with that pain, her fear, her fury at the one who caused all this.
Then something cool and cleansing pours down her spine, shocking her out of the half-trance—Shan's doing. Revan stares up at her through the mask and the red glow as the pain fades to a more tolerable level.
"Jedi," she croaks bitterly, shaking her head. The world swoops and weaves. She coughs, presses a hand to her chest as bones grate against each other where they should not. Definitely broken. At least there's only one Shan now.
"Yes," Shan snaps. "Now where are these escape pods on which we've pinned our final hopes?"
Revan refocuses, checks the level they're on. She lets out a surprised breath that catches somewhere between her lungs and her mouth. "They're on this deck," she says, wonderingly.
"Revan . . ."
She stands, steadies herself with another flare of the dark side, and calls her lightsaber from Shan to herself. The Jedi does not resist the pull, although she probably could have. The saber hilt thunks into her hand. Revan's eyes ache with the effort; she can practically feel the blood vessels bursting in her sclerae. But she has no time for weakness, no time at all—she sets off down the corridor without bothering to see if Shan follows. The Jedi will follow. She has nowhere else to go. So Revan strides along, lighting the way in lurid crimson and black, and Shan trots after her.
Most of the escape pods are destroyed or jettisoned already. They arrive in the bay just as a squad of security officers pile into one of them, filling every available inch of space. Their mousy-haired lieutenant freezes at the sight of her. "Lord Revan?" he calls out.
"Go," she says. "Get out of here."
"Yes, my lord!"
And with a clank and a hiss and a faint rumble of the pod's engines blasting off, she and Shan are alone again.
"Come on," Revan snaps, stumbling towards the nearest pod and keying in the activation code.
"Do you honestly expect to survive out in the middle of a massive space battle?" Shan says.
Revan laughs wetly. "We have a better chance out there than in here. Now get in."
She initializes the launch sequence as Shan clambers into the escape pod. Revan is on the verge of total exhaustion—her battle with the Jedi was long and drawn-out and profoundly tiring, even when it came down to only herself and Shan; her injuries are not content to lie quiet with or without the Force; and she is furious at Malak, yes, but mostly weary, because this, this has been a long time in coming and she should have expected it . . .
Dar'vod.
Damn him.
The pod door seals, and the entire contrivance lurches before it goes spinning off into space. Revan peers out the window at her crippled flagship. The Crusader dwindles into the distance, blooms of fire and debris marring its hull, and when it crumbles into pieces Revan spares a moment to lament the beautiful vessel.
There are no lives left on board by then. She is grateful. Explosive decompression is not a pleasant way to go.
She leans back in her seat, closing her eyes as her head swims again and her ship's corpse doubles and redoubles. She does not want to see more dead Crusaders than there really are. Is. Are. Something.
"You're still injured."
She cracks an eye open. "How amazingly perceptive of you," she says. She coughs again, tastes copper.
Shan is watching her, wary but no longer outright afraid. "You cannot—"
The escape pod lurches, wrenches to port as something hits it—debris or laserfire or a whole ship, she doesn't know, she never does find out. Revan and Shan are both thrown about the madly spinning cabin.
It occurs to her, too late, that perhaps utilizing the safety harnesses might have been a good idea.
o.O.o
Bastila moans as awareness returns, and with it, nausea. She is drifting in zero-g, turning gently, or perhaps the escape pod is turning around her. She has no reference points from this angle. Her head hurts.
What happened? There was . . .
Bastila gasps, remembering. Master Owyn and the others, all gone, and then Darth Revan had her, and they made it off the Crusader but now—she searches the dim pod interior and finds the Sith Lord floating near what should be the floor, currently functioning as a sort of rotating wall. She reaches out with the Force. Revan's exhaustion is palpable, as is her pain.
"Good. You're awake," Revan says, words clipped and tight, as if spoken through her teeth.
Bastila grasps the back of one of the jump seats to steady herself. She stops turning. The nausea abates slightly. "What happens now?" she asks.
"Depends on who finds us first," Revan says. She reaches up, brushes back her hood, and pulls off her helmet. Bastila stares, shocked—every report she's ever heard has claimed that Revan never, ever removes her mask. Beneath, her face is all hard planes and sharp angles, corpse-pale, black hair chopped brutally short. Her eyes are dull yellow, intent on the workings of the helmet—she yanks something out of its interior and holds it between thumb and forefinger, nostrils flaring in distaste. She crushes it, flicks it aside. "No reason to make it easy for them."
"Transponder?" Bastila hazards.
"Which they think I don't know about. And comms," Revan adds sourly. "Just in case."
Bastila chooses not to mention that her own comlink is still operational. "In case—ah. Because the Sith will kill you," she realizes. She almost laughs at the irony, and can't resist pushing her luck: "Your own apprentice wants you dead. That makes the Republic your only chance at survival—what does that tell you about our respective causes, then, hmm?"
"You . . . wanted to capture me alive," Revan says, incredulous. "The Jedi actually went to all that trouble not to assassinate me, but to capture me? Really?" She sighs. "And here I was looking forward to a heroic last stand. My mistake."
"Heroic?" Bastila snaps. "You would call slaughtering Jedi heroic?"
"Do I look interested in justifying myself to you, Padawan?"
"Not particularly," Bastila says, "although you're welcome to try, now that you can't hide behind that ridiculous mask."
"Critiquing my sartorial taste, now?"
"Oh, it's fine, if your intent is to shock and awe people with absurd melodrama."
"Maybe it is." Revan pauses, then says, "This is not the discussion I expected."
Bastila rubs her eyes. "It has been a very long day."
". . . So it has."
They fall into an uncomfortable silence, punctuated by sporadic flashes of light through the viewports as the Republic and Sith fleets do their level best to destroy each other. The Force is strange, here on this battlefield—something has shifted, some vital gear has slipped. It is not painful, exactly, but it is off, and it makes Bastila nervous.
"Problem?" Revan asks.
Bastila pushes herself towards the viewport, peers out into the chaos of the battle. "I don't kn—"
The wrongness in the Force surges, a riptide dragging her under. Bastila cries out at the assault on her senses—she retreats into herself in an attempt to weather it, wait it out, but there is nothing to hold onto, nothing to hide behind. The storm threatens to drown her—
Ice. Walls of black ice. In the sudden calm, Bastila can sense Revan's shock and fear and grim determination as the waves heave and roil, threatening to crush them both, barely held at bay by her mental shield. What is this? the Sith demands, a tiny voice in the maelstrom.
I don't know, Bastila thinks. It's wrong, it shouldn't be—something is wrong—
The walls buckle, Revan's shields cracking. Bastila can hardly breathe. She steels herself, then pushes back, adding her own strength to the walls. She senses surprise, and something approaching gratitude, but cannot pay them any mind as she and Revan try to hold steady amid the convulsions tearing through the Force.
Damn, she hears distinctly, and a heartbeat later she knows why. She can feel the oncoming wave, the worst yet, a tsunami building on itself, towering over them—it will smash them, sweep them away like so much debris.
The dark side burns around Revan, burns like frost. Bastila recoils instinctively until her intent becomes apparent: Revan is throwing every scrap of her power into their shields. Very well. Bastila pours her own into the effort, sealing the cracks in the wall, hoping it will be enough, fearing it will not.
And then—
The wave crashes down. The Force screeches its pain. The wall is gone, obliterated—shards of ice and thought and memory rip through her and through Revan. They cling to each other, Jedi Padawan and Sith Lord, reduced to flotsam in the face of the immensity of the heaving, ravening Force.
It lasts forever. It lasts an instant.
And then it's over, and Bastila breathes again. The Force quiets like a sleeper after a nightmare, still fitful but no longer thrashing. In the searing mental silence that follows, Bastila reaches out, tentative. Revan's spirit burns small and cold and wavering. Wounded, badly, and now subjected to . . . to whatever just happened, she won't last long without help.
Bastila hesitates. She was ordered to capture Revan alive. But having seen the woman in action, having watched her scythe her way through some of the Order's best duelists—having watched her kill Master Owyn—she wonders. She could do nothing. There's barely anything left to save. Then Bastila scowls, disgusted with herself. She is a Jedi, a servant of the Light and of life itself, the Living Force, and that duty comes before all others.
She nudges herself off the wall and takes hold of Revan, maneuvers the Sith towards the jump seats to lay her across them. Reorienting is a dizzying process, but Bastila focuses on a fixed point, and her discomfort fades to a background murmur. She rechecks the tides of the Force—still unstable, but settling down. Good. She sinks into the currents and calls on them to heal.
She is barely conscious of time passing—it could be minutes, or it could be long hours, or it could be no time at all, so deeply is she immersed in the Force. After everything, she has too little strength left to see to any but the worst of Revan's injuries—the repeated head trauma, the broken ribs, the punctured lung. She focuses on mending or at least ameliorating these first.
It is difficult work, but she resurfaces with a stable patient and a sense of . . . not triumph, but satisfaction. Pride, maybe, for all that she should be above such base emotions.
Also, her comlink is chittering with frantic noise.
"—stila—channels—repeat, this is—do you copy?"
She scrambles to retrieve it, nearly sobbing with relief. Voices on the comms—Jedi, her people, safety. "I'm here!" she calls out. "I—this is Padawan Shan—can anyone hear me?"
For a long moment, the static hisses and spits, unintelligible, meaningless. Then familiar voice rings out. "Bastila! This is Master Zhar. Thank goodness you're all right. Where are you? What happened?"
Bastila presses the device to her forehead, shutting her eyes. "We're in an escape pod. I can find and transmit the coordinates and transponder codes. I—I'm all that's left, Master. The others, they're—" She stops. Focus. "I have captured Darth Revan."
o.O.o
tbc