A/N: so I tried a new thing? I had an idea and ran with it and I'm mostly satisfied with it.
also, Jaana isn't part of my main legacy. she's part of the lanai legacy, and I think the only other thing I have posted for them is "rules are made to be broken"
i.
They called her Red.
She never knew why. It wasn't her name, wasn't the name the Jedi had given her when they'd taken her. And of all the children there, the nickname made the least sense when applied to her; there was a red-skinned twi'lek, two togruta with red stripes on their montrals and lekku, a miraluka with bright red hair, even a chiss with those big red eyes — and yet it was Jaana, the gangly rattataki with a big heart and an even bigger imagination, who was saddled with the colorful moniker.
But she took to it, and it became hers in a way the funny-sounding name the Jedi gave her never did.
Red the Stupendous, she called herself, after the first time she learned how to perform card tricks without the Force. Red the Immovable, when she was curled under the sheets asking for five more minutes of sleep. Red the Wise, the first time she returned from a trip to some nearby ruins with one of the masters. Red the Fallen, whenever she was even slightly inconvenienced by a cold.
And then the real training began, and she was just Red. Red, teaching herself how to dance because she was too uncoordinated for the complicated combat maneuvers. Red, waking up before dawn for the thirty seventh day in a row because she just couldn't figure out why everyone thought the sunrise was so beautiful. Red, bloodying her knuckles in defense of a friend and accepting the punishment without even a word of argument.
She was just Red, and the masters called her Jaana and lectured her on tempering her emotion.
ii.
She took to meditation like it was made for her. Not the meditation they taught her, sitting stiff and still for hours and prodding at a Force that was alive and vibrant and always in motion.
She meditated by mirroring the Force, by being alive and vibrant and always in motion.
Red still woke up every morning before the sun, never having found the beauty in the sunrise but craving the serenity that came with the day's earliest hours. She danced, leaving trails in the dew in the field behind the temple, breathing and sweating and connecting to the Force.
iii.
As a child, she'd once proclaimed, proudly, that she would wield a red lightsaber when she grew up.
Red understood, now, why the masters had been so scandalized and why she'd been so rapidly hushed. She'd been young, then, and knew nothing of the wars beyond her home and her temple and had only a child's fascination with clever coincidence.
Sitting in the gardens outside of the grand temple on Tython, she watched, taking in the vibrant range of greens and blues and even yellows and violets and other colors in the lightsabers that hummed to life in the hands of experienced Jedi. She would sit and pull her knees to her chest and stare, enraptured, as older padawans and Jedi and even masters trained and sparred, imagining herself in their position.
She would wear magnificent armor, she decided, under an elegant hooded robe. Her lightsaber would be green, and she would be the best Jedi on Tython.
But when the time came for her to complete her trials, Red wore simple armor — without a robe, as they tended to impede her movement — and the crystals in her twin sabers were a brilliant blue. She wasn't the best Jedi on Tython, nor did she desire to be.
It was nothing like the daydreaming she'd done as a child, but that no longer mattered; she was quick, and a skilled combatant, and the Jedi would use her as they saw fit. Even when parts of the Code were difficult for her to grasp, the masters guided her and she followed without question.
She was a Jedi, and they were her teachers, and Red would listen.
iv.
It was on Tython that she fell in love with her best friend, a twi'lek with the most beautiful blue eyes. She ran when Red confessed, and it was too much and it was never quite the same when they spoke after that; so Red found solace in the arms of a zabrak boy she'd met the week before. He held her while she cried, then she kissed him until the masters found them and took them back to the temple.
v.
How odd, she thought, for the Jedi council to send such a young padawan on such important missions. But she followed every order without hesitance, traversed a dozen planets because they asked her to, watched a planet die because she was too late.
For that, too, they praised her.
An exemplary Jedi, they called her, full of dedication and light and serenity. They made her a Knight, enlisted her help in an assault on their greatest enemy, then reminded her the virtues of patience and peace and quiet meditation. They gave her a crew — friends — and told her to remain distant, not to form attachments.
And that was her greatest shortfall, her crew. A droid with more personality than the entire Jedi council combined. A padawan — then a Jedi — that Red had trained with for years and knew better than anyone else in the galaxy. A medic who she spent more than one ill-advised night with, not realizing how much she wanted to be wanted, how much she craved being desired for more than her skill as a Jedi. A soldier with an eye for efficiency, whose advice Red had come to seek out both in and out of battle.
Red grew, as did her affection for her crew, and when the Jedi sent her to face the Emperor she pretended she was at peace with the fact that she was expected to put the mission before those she called friends.
It unsettled her, but she would do it, because she was a Jedi.
vi.
And then there was darkness.
It was always there within you, the Emperor had told her, his voice clear in her mind though she knew he didn't speak. Buried, well-hidden by your precious Jedi teachings. But rattataki filth like you? It was always there.
She knew he was right. An alien like herself would never be worthy of the Empire, never be worthy of becoming anything more than a plaything hidden up in the Emperor's fortress. It shamed her, and shame led to fury and fury led to lashing out at people she'd once considered her friends.
Her lightsabers were red, now, a brilliant crimson that was reflected in eyes that used to be a calm grey. Her armor was sleek and black and imposing, with heavy boots that made her feet ache and a cape that cascaded from her shoulders. She was Red, she was his enforcer, and there were few who could guess that she'd ever been anything other than Sith — and those few resided in prison cells and were the occasional focus of Red's fury.
The Emperor was pleased, he told her. Her lessons were going well, and perhaps one day he'd unleash her against the Jedi. It was a thought she cherished, to strike back against those who tried to bind her and hold her and smother her potential. She listened eagerly whenever he spoke to her; she had little say in the matter, anyway, given that Vitiate was a constant presence within her thoughts.
There was nothing she could hide from him, and nothing he said that she could refute.
Red, he called her, plucking the nickname from her mind with no shortage of perverse pleasure. How fitting a name.
vii.
She returned to the temple a failure, with blood on her hands and a Sith at her side and a war at her back.
First, they praised her. Then, they told her to do it again.
viii.
The second time was easier.
She threw herself at the Sith and failed, but this time she returned to awards and titles and praise and a stern reminder from the Grandmaster that she was slipping, becoming too harsh and too cold. The Jedi assumed it was residual, an effect of her time with the Emperor but they didn't know — they couldn't, because they'd never even asked.
They'd just sent her headlong into a war she'd known nothing about and reminded her to meditate.
And they did it again, after her second failure to kill the Emperor. They sent her after the Sith again and again, like she was no more than a weapon for the council to wield. There was Ilum, fighting both the Empire and the Sith who'd betrayed it. There was a fortress on a moon, suffocating under the grasp of the Dread Masters. There was Korriban, an academy filled with children and students and history, and Jaana had left it in flames with not one ounce of remorse.
Temper your emotions, the Jedi had always told her.
And then came Tython. As she arrived, Jaana watched as it burned, watched the temple crumble and Sith and Imperials search and fortify and conquer. Blood covered the fields she'd once danced in. Broken lightsabers and crumpled bodies littered the libraries she'd loved as a child. Triumphant Sith stalked the meditation rooms she'd never spent enough time in.
She wondered if the masters that lay dead at her feet had even felt anything. Had the shattered walls broken their resolve? Had the endless waves of Sith? Had the lifeless children? Or had they simply kept their emotions in check the entire time?
Jaana — she didn't even have to try. There was no anger, no sorrow, not even satisfaction as she tore through the Imperial defenses.
The Jedi had taught her well.
ix.
There was Manaan, and Lehon, and Rishi. And then, there was Yavin IV.
She didn't know the first time she'd seen Darth Marr. It was ages ago, she was certain. He cut such an imposing figure, and it wasn't one easily forgotten, and Jaana did know she hadn't ever seen him in person — not until they'd been crowded in a stuffy storehouse with a dozen Sith and Jedi and soldiers. He'd been no less striking then than he was now, amongst the near-stifling Darkness of the moon.
When he spoke to her, it was with confidence and self-assuredness and guile and, sometimes, some semblance of goading. It infuriated her, broke through the shell of impassiveness she'd cultivated over the last several years, and Jaana felt memories from her time with the Emperor creep up from the edge of her mind.
But this was different — the Emperor had mocked her and cut her down and torn at her already fraying confidence. Marr simply didn't hold the same respect for the Jedi that he did for the Sith. In return, Jaana had made it clear she held little respect for the Sith.
They reached as much of a standstill as they did mutual understanding. For the most part, it was a workable situation, even if neither was entirely impressed with the other. But they had limits, and Jaana quickly reached hers; it was the third time he'd called her Satele's Jedi that she first snapped at him, yelling and arguing about anything she could.
Jaana didn't belong to Satele, didn't belong to the Jedi, and certainly wasn't their weapon to direct on Yavin.
She sensed Marr's surprise at her outburst — as brief and dulled as the emotion was — and sensed Satele's disapproval as clearly as she heard it in the quiet rebuke the Grandmaster offered.
Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but Jaana was almost certain that Marr seemed to hold some respect for her, after that.
x.
The Force shall set us free.
It somehow sounded more convincing when Marr said it. More infuriating, as well.
Or perhaps, infuriating because it was convincing.
It had been different, hearing him say it before, like it was a truth obvious to Sith that the Jedi were simply too dull to grasp, like it was irrefutable. Hearing him now was like hearing about an anchor, a central point for Sith — and for Marr himself — to rest their beliefs on, something ingrained within Sith that, perhaps, the Jedi could understand if they would only listen and consider.
It had been different, too, because they were no longer around a conference table planning a critical operation. Jaana stood, naked, pants slung over her shoulder as she sorted through the clothes and armor that had been strewn around, occasionally tossing something in Marr's direction. She'd been searching for a topic of conversation, something light and casual, while she'd dressed, but had asked about the Sith code and somehow hadn't been entirely disappointed.
The campaign on Yavin IV was drawing to an end, and they still disagreed during meetings as vehemently as the first day on the moon; now, there was a satisfying outlet for that anger and tension.
The Jedi had taught her to suppress her passion, while the Sith claimed it was a step towards freedom. Jaana wasn't certain either code was quite right.
xi.
A three month joint expedition into Wild Space was a very long time to spend together.
After the first month, Jaana decided she actually liked Marr for something more than sex. After the second month, she realized she didn't know the last time she'd spent a night in her own quarters. Twelve days after that, a shared bath spent arguing over training routines was interrupted by an attack.
xii.
She'd been imprisoned with the Empire's best — Darth Marr, who had become the informal head of the Dark Council itself, and Lord Lanai, the so-called Wrath, whose rank within the Sith Jaana still didn't quite understand — and when they were released, their captors had made it perfectly clear that they had no idea of the importance of their prisoners and no desire to learn of it.
Jaana had sensed Vitiate the moment they were brought before him, as did Marr; Vitiate himself seemed amused, seemed to think their rage was entertaining. He tried talking to them, correcting what he believed to be their misunderstanding, but there was no way to explain away the things he'd done.
And when Marr attacked him — because of course he would, of course he wouldn't bow to Vitiate, of course he couldn't stand by and let him walk away — Jaana followed, sending four knights careening off the ledge with a single swipe of her hand.
And when Vitiate struck at Marr, a haunting sort of smile crossing his face, Jaana leapt. She used the Force to propel herself forward, launching herself at Vitiate and breaking his concentration as they fell and slid across the floor. With one last shove of Force energy — just for good measure — Jaana scrambled to her feet, knocking another two knights away as she fell to her knees beside Marr.
Still alive.
When she looked up, expecting a continued fight, Jaana found the throne room had fallen quiet; the strange Sith, Lord Lanai, stood before a recovered Vitiate, and slowly dropped to one knee. I bowed to you once before, she claimed, I would do so again.
Before Jaana could react or Vitiate could answer, there was the hiss of a lightsaber and the glow of yellow as the Emperor fell and was replaced by the white-robed prince.
The Jedi had sent her, all those years ago, to strike down Vitiate, and as the knights dragged Jaana away once again all she could think was that once again, she'd failed.