Cross posted from AO3.
I do not own any of the characters. They are property of Lucasfilms.
Red, a taboo, an omen, in the testimony of the masters, a siren of the Dark Side, unchecked, unsealed untamed passion.
The last color to brush his sight before the black conquered.
Black is tolerable, like pretending he pledged to a permanent life choice to live with sealed eyelids. As a Youngling, he batted away benign lasers in the helmeted cavern, escorted by the Force and the nurturing instructions of the masters, their voices laden with direction. He summons the sea of black to drown out the red.
But red haunts in flickers, like an in-switchable warning light. Every morning or midnights, he has survived a nightmare. But flashes of red does not make him look forward to being awake. He can at least dream in other colors and shapes of reminiscences. Visions arrive in sounds, like much of the past. When he managed to secure himself in slumber, he's surrounded by the beaming of lasers, his master's hollers, the teasing of his clone brothers, an infant's wails, the brawls in Gorse, and the urgent vocality of orders, the flurry of a lost comrade's lightsabers, the apocalyptic shattering of Malachor, his apprentice's sobs, and he might pinpoint the flow and flurry of the stream of the past, but disparate noises, untraceable shouts and sobs, were so blurred and immeshed that they clouded the distinction between bygone days or vague prophecies.
He's quite acquainted with the dawn, the rising suns, like repeats of the Imperial Holo-Net news. He has lived through plethora of dawns on various planets, some with multiple suns. Once, years ago, his senses rigged on alcohol, he possessed enough lucidity to remember his corny musing, "prettier than a woman," at the sunset.
But he never absorbed its warmth. He wonders if he's overplaying his amplified senses in lieu of his dark-laden sight.
He feels the directional angles of the sunbeams caressing his cheekbones. Like the magnetic intensity of a compass needle pointing to him. He feels its direction, easing him into a natural spotlight. If he held still enough, it expands every milliseconds like arms opening wider and wider. It's nature's heated bacta, a counteract to the irreversible shivers of Malachor.
It's not his first dawn blind. It's just that he incidentally has minutes to spare to practice his climbing, relearn the exterior framework of the ship, perched himself above the cockpit. As he steps precariously toward the density of heat, he feels the darkness isn't an obstruction or an unwanted shroud, but a decoder, even bizarrely, a portal, an extended doorway to something beyond. The direction of the sun guides him there, reminding him there's an undiscovered light at the end of this tunnel.
It's the first time he's chummy with dawn, like reuniting with an old friend he never knew and making memories.
He knows she's coming by the clangs of hands scaling upon metal and the padding of her boots. The pressure of her ungloved hand is a different category of warmth, one that rivals dawn. She sang of dawn before. Dawn, one symbol of hope amid the flames and the destruction of her village. That lullaby eased her into sleep. For him, it gave him a purpose to enjoy being awake to absorb the mantra of lyrics, the "ardour and hope" in Rylothian, and it would be her final verse, so we may reclaim our fire, that would drive them both into slumber.
He doesn't need to be recaped on the color of dawn, but she does so. Asking, tell me what you see, has became so habitual that she defaulted to describing the scenery or the portrait without his inquiry. Maybe she's searching for anything to talk about. They exhausted their talks of Malachor and oncoming missions.
"Hue of yellow, and pinkish-red."
Red. The flickers revert.
"Red," he echoes back.
Instead of repressing the red or willing back the darkness, he converts it in other shades. The orange hue of an artist's masterpiece, the explosion of the enemy's vessels, the fireworks over Empire Day. He thinks of the previous sunrises and sunsets, one when he and his master rehearsed Form III, and another radiating from the cockpit window when he occupied the vacancy in the co-pilot chair, trading banters with the pilot. Then there was the final sunset, where he embraced her before its haloed shape, before the mission that turned out the lights.
Dawn has shades of red, yet this red welcomes, like the paint of an inspired graffiti artist (he depended on words though he can trace the terrain of shapes on the wall). Red that brightens instead of bleed or burn. Red that's like a regulated fire's warmth, not feral destruction. Warm like the cup of steaming beverage she passed to him on Rion, the ephemeral brush of her fingertips upon his fingers.
Warm like the pressure of her hand upon his right now.
Red is rebirth. An assurance that even if light evaded his vision, he'll learn where to trace it through and with the red. Red is a puzzle piece of light.