Caein Thema stared at his lightsaber, contemplating how quickly it could kill him.

Well, staring might not be the right word. More accurately, he felt the energy and position of the metal, crystal, and blade as the Force flowed through them. He'd found he could get away with saying it was hard to explain by asking anybody who asked what it was like to see. There was something very amusing about how inadequate Basic was for describing colour. Kira had spent many afternoons trying to find the exact words that would help Caein understand exactly what the colour blue was. She was stubborn like that.

The miralukan man sighed, his lightsaber hummed, and his ship did both. The Amaranthine Wake had taken him across the galaxy dozens of times, carried him through battles that struck the Empire vicious blows, and now gave him means to flee the greatest horror of his short life.

Caein's ship was one of his few prides, inextricably linked as it was to his piloting skills. It was like his lightsabers that way. Alone, they were just tools, not destructive in any way. In the right hands, put to the right purpose, they were veritable incarnations of death. Just like Caein himself had been, for the past few months.

Caein snorted. An undignified sound, uncharacteristic of a Jedi. He'd been an incarnation of death long before… what had happened. He'd just never cared, because his wrath had been pointed at those he considered monsters, enemies whose only purpose was to kill or be killed. Now, he'd seen the other side, so to speak.

Falling backwards onto his bed, lightsaber still held before him, Caein took a moment to envy other sapients. It wasn't the eyes that he envied. He didn't care much about sight. It was the idea of crying. He'd seen enough sapients cry to know what it was like. Their emotions welled up in them and seemed to gain physical form as the body let the feelings go. For some, it wasn't enough, and the tears would go on and on for ages, but for many it seemed that crying was a profound release. Knight Thema wished he could have something like that.

He didn't even try to stop the despair from overwhelming him. Better to accept it than live in the same fear he'd wallowed in until this day. What use was a fear of falling to the dark side when he'd already done so?

The lightsaber dropped to Caein's throat, so close he imagined he could feel the heat of it. All it would take was a slight relaxation of his grip, a moment's lapse or weakness, and Caein Thema, the Hero of Tython, Emperor's Puppet, would be no more. This same blade had killed dozens of Sith, would kill hundreds more, if Caein could live with himself.

Except, this same blade had also ended the lives of countless innocents. He could never absolve himself of that evil. He wasn't like Kira, who'd shaken off the Emperor's will before she could ever be forced to betray her values.

He envied her for that. Envied her so powerfully he ached with the pain of it, felt seared by the terror of the Dark Side it could lead him back to.

Caein sat up and extinguished his lightsaber, hiding it in the folds of his blankets as his door slid open.

"Cae, I can feel you moping from across the ship," Kira Carsen, his padawan, chided him as she walked in.

Caein nodded. "I am sorry, Kira," he said honestly. "I will try to dim my self."

Kira gave him an exasperated look. "Not what I meant, you big oaf."

In spite of himself, Caein smiled. "Is that any way to speak to your master?"

"You didn't kill Scourge," Kira said quietly, undeterred, as she sat down beside Caein. "You haven't accepted any Aegis missions or gone Sith-hunting in weeks. Cae, you can't pretend you're okay."

Caein took a while to reply and, for once, Kira didn't say anything to fill the silence.

"I fell," he finally said in an uncharacteristically quiet voice. The words contained such an indescribable horror, he couldn't say any more.

"You weren't the only one, Cae," Kira whispered back. "Some of our order's greatest masters are still out there. We need your help to stop him. I think you're the only one who can."

"Why?" Caein's voice was bitter, and he stared into Kira's aura hopelessly, even as his head bowed low to the floor and his elbows dug into his knees in a hopeless slump. "You can't really think that, Kira. If I met him again… there's no reason he couldn't do exactly the same thing again. You don't understand how easy it was for him. A wave of his hand, and the power just… it was like drowning at the bottom of an ocean. Only, when I gave in, when it took my last breath, the nightmares were unimaginable."

He could see Kira's aura dim as her hope started to die. Of course it would. Caein Thema, Hero of Tython, the vanguard of every attack on the Sith, the fearless leader she'd followed across the galaxy, now nothing more than a broken man. What had Master Orgus been thinking, bringing him back?

"He won't," Kira said firmly, breaking her master from his morbid contemplation. He raised an eyebrow skeptically at her assertion. "You can beat it. Maybe not right now, but you can train. I know what it's like to have that man in your mind, Cae. I know what that ocean feels like, and I think you can beat it, just like I did."

"And then what," Caein asked, interrupting Kira's pep talk, "a Sith defeats the Emperor and starts another power struggle, eventually taking the throne for himself?"

"You're not a Sith," Kira said, putting a hand on Caein's shoulder. "You can't actually believe that. No matter what he made you do, you're not one of them."

She pulled him to face her, as if to look into his nonexistent eyes. "You're a good man, Caein. Brave and loyal. You might have scared me once in a while, but it was never because I thought you might turn on us, it was how much you wanted the Republic to win, how much you wanted to end the threat against all of us. I think sometimes even you forget that, in the end, what you're fighting for is to protect the people of the Republic. And we need you ready to do it again."

Again, Caein envied humans their ability to cry. There was a hopelessness to that plea, just as there was inside of him. And yet, he was needed. In spite of everything he'd done, all the innocent people he'd killed, how powerless he'd been… Kira still needed him, still believed the people of the Republic needed him.

There… might be a way he could prepare.

Caein picked up his lightsabers, ignoring the look Kira gave him when he retrieved the first from under his blankets, and stood. With a solemn word of thanks, he walked towards the main area of the ship.

"What are you going to do?"

He stopped for a second, doing Kira the courtesy of turning to face her, focusing more on her presence than those of the ship's other denizens, against all miralukan combat protocol.

"I'm going to kill Lord Scourge," he said with a bitter smile. "And if that doesn't work, I'll try again later."

Then he went to find the only person who could help him train to fight the Emperor.