Warnings: References to political violence, slavery, and systematized oppression.
Notes: Got a request for "faith + Cham Syndulla" over on LJ. Just a quick character study. None of this belongs to me.
faith
In the beginning, he'd believed in a lot of things. He'd believed with the blind, fever-edged force of idealism and the weight of too little experience. If the people only believed, if they only had something to fight for, if they were only free, they could right themselves, they could remake the world. Ryloth could be whole, free of corruption, free of the trade that shackled its people and sapped its spirit.
He'd really believed, in the beginning, that if he could just tell the Senate, the rest of the galaxy, what was happening on Ryloth, if they only knew, they would be outraged, and the slave trade would come crashing down and Ryloth would once more be for the Twi'leks.
He really had believed that, once.
He'd put himself forward for clan speaker. There had been those who called him a reactionary, but not enough, and he'd won. But the victories that came after that were small, grasping, double-edged, sometimes not really victories at all.
He'd gone for tribal speaker, and they'd called him a radical. This time he didn't win. It almost didn't matter, because he'd seen how the system worked. Dar Antalla had money, had prestige (had slaves), and he did not.
He went for Senator, and this time, they called him a fraterist. This time, he went to anti-slavery rallies and meetings conducted solely in Ryl and tried to tell himself that he was not afraid of the death threats. Because it was not about him, after all, and he had faith in his cause.
Orn Free Taa won that election. His acceptance speech focused on progress and growth and upward mobility. Two of his slaves, dressed in flimsy garments and pasted smiles, sat in the wings and applauded at all the right moments.
That night, the death squads came for Cham Syndulla.
For a long time after that, then, he hadn't believed in anything.
He went to ground. He rediscovered the old secret places in the desert, the old forgotten people, the silence of the night sky. He set fire to his old life and gave himself over to the desert, where everything was uncertain and there was nothing to believe in but the small, finite skills that kept him alive, and which would eventually fail.
But it wasn't enough.
He had run, but he'd gotten nowhere. He'd lost his faith, perhaps, but he hadn't lost his eyes. The slave raids, the beatings, the killings of worker-organizers, the weightless speeches about progress and the Republic's dedication to freedom continued. There was a raid on the little village where he lived now.
And it wasn't enough, anymore, that he didn't believe. It didn't matter. He could almost laugh, because the question of faith, now, seemed so immaterial, in the face of life-and-death reality.
He came back, and this time he didn't bother with politics. They had called him a reactionary, a radical, a fraterist. A revolutionary. He decided, for once, he would play to their script.
In the desert, he gathered the dispossessed, the ragged, the escaped slaves, the convicts, and those with nothing left to lose. He gathered them, and he told them about the revolution.
Gobi said, "Do you really think we can win this fight?" His songs were spreading fast, like a river underground. It was said they gave the people hope. Cham knew how Gobi would answer the question.
Cham smiled at him. "I think," he said, "that this is not about faith."
He doesn't stop fighting.