Notes: Thanks to jedi_of_ennth for the beta and the encouragement.
Disclaimer: As I am neither George Lucas nor Ben Gibbard, nothing you recognize is mine.
if heaven and hell decide
that they both are satisfied
illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs
if there's no one beside you
when your soul embarks
then I'll follow you into the dark
--death cab for cutie, "I will follow you into the dark"
Convincing him to help you is all too easy. You know how he feels about you, and you make full use of it. You hint that, if he came with you, you might listen to his warnings. You might let him save you. Maybe, you whisper to the back of his mind, maybe I could even learn to love you again. It's not a lie, not entirely. But more importantly, it gets the job done.
You want vengeance above all else, and you don't care what you have to do to get it. If you take him down with you, it's his own fault.
---
The two of you still make a good team, despite all that's passed between you. You plan the attacks, and he leads you to the Vong, no matter where they happen to be hiding at the moment. They're not in the Force, but somehow he still knows where to look. He's always been good at finding things.
You still can't get him to teach you what he learned at the Shadow Academy, but it's all right. You've always been good at improvising.
---
You kill as many Vong as you can, and it's everything you hoped it would be. You live for the savage, thrumming euphoria that takes you when you see fear spark in their eyes, when you strike them down and send them to their twisted gods. Let them pray those gods have mercy on them, because you never will.
Zekk still tries to incapacitate rather than kill, but there are exceptions to the rule. Once, you stupidly get yourself ambushed by a full contingent of Vong warriors, all fixated on killing the Jeedai infidel, and it's a little much for even you. You're starting to wonder if they might not succeed; and then Zekk shows up.
He kills all of them with vicious efficiency before you can even process what's happening. He stands over the last body, his back to you, and you start to realize just how much power he's been hiding all these years. He's a dark inferno in the Force, crackling with rage and fury, consuming all the energy in the room like oxygen. He turns, suddenly, to make sure you're all right. His eyes are glassy and so bright that you have to look away.
You're starting to wonder how well you really know him.
---
When the Masters hear about your exploits, they're shocked and grief-stricken, but still too weak to try to stop you. You doubt they'd be so lenient if it were only Zekk out here, but your status protects him too. The Council will take action eventually, but you don't need anywhere near that much time.
---
Nightmares wake you in the night, and your eyes snap open to find him standing awkwardly at the edge of your bunk. You pull him down next to you; he strokes your hair and murmurs comfort to you until you slip back into oblivion. It becomes a habit that you'll never admit you need, and in the mornings neither of you speaks of it.
---
You and Zekk find yourselves venerated as folk heroes on several planets. There's even a statue of you in a town square on Agamar. It feels good.
Things go well, for a while.
---
You're on some backwater planet, waiting for a ship that you know carries Vong raiders in its belly. You've laid a trap for it, just a simple bomb that you can trigger with the Force at the right time. You're disappointed at having to use crude explosives; they lack that personal touch you so enjoy. But a good Vong is a dead Vong, so you're not complaining. Much.
Your muscles tense as you feel the ship approaching. It lands smoothly in its designated bay, and you grasp the bomb's trigger in your mind, feeling Zekk do the same beside you. You detonate it, already tasting destruction on your tongue, just as you're knocked back by a roiling wave of panic from Zekk. Time stops as you cast out, looking for the source of his shock, and see a disembarking family just inside the blast zone. Horrified, you both push, but not hard enough, not fast enough; and they're gone.
Normal awareness returns with a rush, electrifying overwrought nerves and synapses, as you realize what you've done. Time restarts with cruel, crystalline precision, even as reality twists and folds into itself, rupturing under the strain.
The sound wave from the blast rips into you, tearing at your ears; the crack is deafening, but you don't bother to shield. Neither does he.
---
Even this can be justified. You regret the deaths, but really, you did those people a favor. The Jedi would argue that you violated their free will by taking away their choice in the matter of death, but they would have died anyway, probably without meaning. The people you killed at least had a purpose to their deaths, dying heroically for the greater good. They might even be grateful to you now. Instead of taking, you gave: you gave them purpose and meaning, like the self-made goddess you are.
You try to explain this to Zekk, but he just laughs. It's a bitter, jagged sound that shivers unpleasantly through your bones, but you shake it off, indignant. You don't understand what he finds so funny.
---
There's a Vong scout patrol on a rural planet in the Outer Rim. They've taken over one of the frontier towns and have already started a celebratory massacre. You put them down before they can go any farther. It's quick and it's brutal and the villagers see the whole thing.
As it turns out, the villagers don't like Jedi any more than they liked the Vong. An angry mob isn't exactly what you expected as a thank you. The two of you escape the throng, but not quite intact. You'll need a healing trance to get rid of the deep gash on your thigh, and you came uncomfortably close to being burned alive.
You torch the village on your way out. Zekk doesn't try to stop you.
---
The nightmares still visit you in the night, and so does he, but now he holds you just a little too tightly. Sometimes you could swear you hear him whispering penance, but for what, you don't know.
---
You discover that Vong are actually capable of being helpful before they die. You find a high-ranking Vong on one of your missions, so you capture it and torture it into telling you something useful. You never would have thought you'd enjoy torture so much, but it's the next best thing after the adrenaline rush of killing. When you're inflicting pain on the Vong, you're not thinking about your own. You're not smelling Anakin's body burn or feeling the ache in your heart where Jacen used to be. It's enough, for now.
Zekk eventually discovers your new hobby. He's predictably judgmental about it, which only makes you angrier. When you suggest that he give it a try next time, and start to describe the exact sound the Vong's spine made when you snapped it, he finally shuts up and goes away.
---
You take down the mirror in your cabin when you stop recognizing the woman staring back at you. Where you once had curves, she has angles with edges like tempered steel, and her eyes are more amber than brandy.
Zekk notices, especially the eyes, but you say it's just a trick of the on-board lighting. You can see the doubt that shadows his own eyes at that, but he wants to believe you, you can tell. He's always been gullible that way.
---
You start making plans without consulting him. Even now, he'd never approve of this one.
You know where Tsavong Lah is hiding, along with the rest of the Vong fleet. They're encamped near a small colony planet on the outskirts of the Core Worlds. They want the surrender of Coruscant, and they're threatening to release coral seeds into the colony's atmosphere if they don't get it. Surrender is unthinkable, but so is allowing the slow, agonizing death of hundreds of thousands. With so many Vong ships, there's no way for the Alliance—or even the Jedi—to be sure that even a full-scale attack would save the planet.
Know your enemy, the saying goes, and the Yuuzhan Vong do. They know the Alliance, and they know the Jedi, well enough to know that neither institution will sacrifice the innocent lives it would take to defeat them. Even the foreign governments will be mired in enough controversy to prevent them from taking action. The Vong know this.
But they don't know you.
---
The Vong fleet, as it turns out, is orbiting an unstable star. Under normal circumstances, the star would have millennia left to live, but circumstances can be changed. You might not have access to any Holocrons, but you know the old stories of Naga Sadow. He might have been a Sith, but you're a Skywalker. Raw power isn't a problem.
You're going to make the star go nova. You think you can start the process and escape before the Vong even realize what's happening. The planet will be destroyed along with the Vong, but in exchange for permanently exterminating the Vong and saving millions of lives, a few hundred thousand seems a fair exchange.
Having made your decision, you go to your cabin and lock the door. If the Lightning Rod had an autopilot, you would have just knocked Zekk out, but it doesn't matter. Nothing's going to stop you now.
---
The molten heart of the star pulses in your mind, primordial and inexhaustible. Its fire flows through your hands like water, and it's so simple to see what needs to be done to send it spiraling out of control. You grasp it one final time, take a deep breath, and—the door to your cabin bursts off its hinges.
You would have expected him to be angry, aghast. Instead, he just looks bone-weary, and older than you've ever seen him.
You try to make him see reason, but he won't listen. Fed up and running out of time before the Vong detect you, you finally tell him that he can either kill you or get out of your way. You mean it, certainly; your whole life has been leading up to what you're about to do. But you know Zekk, and he'll never be able to deny you anything.
He doesn't walk away.
He's looking back at you with something like acceptance in his eyes. Bile rises in your throat. Your fingers have just closed around your lightsaber when your toolbox catches you at the base of your skull.
---
When you wake up, you think you're on Tatooine. Your flightsuit is soaked with sweat, and light seeps painfully through your eyelids. Your head is throbbing, but you manage to open your eyes against the glare. You see Zekk standing at the viewport, one hand outstretched toward the star. His shoulders are tensed with effort, and power curls from him like steam. Fascinated in spite of yourself, you croak out a question. "What are you doing?"
He doesn't even turn his head. "Something I never taught you," he says, and his voice quavers like a bad transmission.
Even from the deck, you can see the blazing light of the solar flare as it erupts: an arcing tongue of fire coming to devour you, and the Vong. He was right about there being another way; the planet is far enough away to survive a flare. But you and Zekk aren't.
---
You should have seen this coming.
You've only got a few seconds left to live. That would have bothered you once, but that was such a very long time ago, in the age of innocence and hope and rescues.
He probably thinks he's rescuing you now. He might even be right.
Well, you think. What are we waiting f—
---
You get what you wanted in the end. You're Jaina Solo, after all.