All You've Ever Been
A Story by UndeniablyMe
Anguish.
Hatred.
Anger.
Darkness.
"This is all you've ever been."
You've never experienced pain like this before.
It's not just the burning of electricity as it dances almost lovingly across your hands, arms and face. It's not the way your heart—the one that you were sure your dark master tore out, mercilessly, years ago—is being ripped in half as you realize that, yes, you're doing the unthinkable, sacrificing yourself for the very alliance that only months ago you were searching to destroy. It's not realizing that, this time, when you die, you're really going to die, there isn't any coming back; there will be no miracle.
It might have to do a little with the way your ripping heart is burning, it might have to do with that place buried deep inside your chest, the one that feels like it's about to explode. And it might just have to do with the fact that you're leaving behind the only person you've ever really cared about, the only person who's ever showed you the smallest bit of compassion in your life.
If you close your eyes you can feel her in your grasp again, just for a moment. You can feel her warmth on the ramp, the moment before you fell into your destiny, as she clung to you—making you believe that for all the galaxy, all the promises of power, you'd never let her go.
The intolerable pain breaks, and that piece of you that felt like it was going to explode gives way. And, quite suddenly, you're not anywhere anymore.
It's only darkness, overwhelming darkness, and a cloudy sense of being nowhere. Is there such a thing as time anymore? You're not sure. Is there such a thing as you anymore? Are you not merely drifting, shapelessly, through a great abyss of nothing? Nothing; dark nothing. What was it like to feel? What was it like to exist?
Is this… is this what it's like to be dead? To, truly, be dead?
It's worse than you thought.
She is screaming again.
It's been five years—five years—and she still wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. It's a good thing that the rooms aboard the Rogue Shadow are air tight, otherwise the other passengers might have caught onto her secret long ago.
Captain Juno Eclipse is a former Imperial pilot, branded a traitor, and the best fighter in the rebel alliance, with a large enough bounty on her head to support a small planet. She can outmaneuver the best of the Empire's trained fighter pilots with her eyes closed, have you flat on your back dead with a gaping hole through your chest faster than you could say, "Blaster fire!" and is quite possibly the most wanted woman in the galaxy.
But none of that matters when she retreats back to the cold, quiet of her quarters aboard the Rogue Shadow. Her nightmares don't care who she is now or where she is going. No, all her nightmares care about is what has already past, what once was.
Being in love is not something that was ever in the plan. Juno Eclipse—Captain Juno Eclipse to you—had intended to live her life fully and utterly alone. It wouldn't be hard, she reasoned. After all, looking at the wisp of a father she had left, she knew that falling in love was certainly not for her. Not if you only lost those people you cared about. Love was a weakness in man. And the life of a fighter pilot, especially those of the fabled Black Eight, was short. You lived to 25 if you were lucky, anything past that was considered ancient.
Perhaps she had thought that, in death, her father would finally give her the recognition she had so often craved in life. If dying for the Empire was what it took her father to notice her, well, so be it. It was why she'd joined the Courlag Academy at such a young age. Some might call it twisted, to be wishing to die a hero's death, but the Empire was all she'd known. The lies they'd built had been her whole world. The lies that came crashing down all too fast.
Branded a traitor. A traitor. And her father had more than likely died of shame.
Well, let him rest in peace. It's more than she's done for the last treasonous days of her life anyways. Ever since she'd been handpicked for a top secret mission, her life had been blasted apart. It wouldn't hurt so much, to die or live, if it hadn't been for that one thing. Love.
Can she even call it that?
Juno Eclipse's eyes finally snap open as she realizes, once again, the horrifying sounds grating against the otherwise silent air in her chambers are being ripped from her throat. The sound cuts off, unnaturally, and she presses her face into her bedclothes, her frame shaking and trembling. There are no tears on her cheeks, not this time, but her eyes are over-bright, crazed, like a wounded animal.
Eclipse abhors weakness but, in her moments of vulnerability, she can only find enough of herself to curl up, arms wrapped tightly around her aching body, and wait for the images to pass.
They are always the same faces, in the same order, saying the same things. It has been so ever since that day, five years ago, when the rebel alliance was formed. Her mother's ashen, cold features is the only silent face among her specters, the first of many to come back to haunt her. Her father's stern expressions and shouts of betrayal, disgust—revulsion—are nothing new. The unforgiving steel in her father's eyes have never left her, but they fail to turn her heart anymore.
There is only one thing left, yes just one, that inspires true fear anymore. And this is the only thing that is different each and every dream.
She hadn't witnessed Starkiller's—no, Galen. Galen Marek--sacrifice. She had been busy, calculating the jump to hyper speed, getting passengers aboard and activating the cloaking and shield mechanisms. The lives of some of the most important and central people to the rebellion were in her hands. There hadn't been time to stop and find Marek. But she can still remember how far away they were—5,421.73 light years—when she realized that he had done all he'd said he'd do.
And Marek wasn't on board.
"He sacrificed himself to save us. He's a hero. No, more than that. He's a Jedi."
Empty words. Captain Eclipse sometimes can't help but think, selfishly, that she'd rather he hadn't been a Jedi. She'd rather that he'd gotten back on board, covered in as many scratches and injuries as was his desire, giving her a barely controlled smirk and some crack about her timing. If that made him a coward…? Well, Marek was never a coward. He wouldn't have been able to live with himself.
So, then. Captain Juno Eclipse would have lost him either way.
But kriff, what she wouldn't give to see him on board again. She'd never seen how he'd done it, 'become one with the force'. But her mind enjoyed conjuring up images, during periods of inactivity, of how it might have been. And that is the reason behind her screaming.
A part of her argues that she should have gone back. She should have checked, should have tried. He hadn't let the possibility of being vaporized by a star or suffering the wrath of his master dissuade him when it had come time to save her from a collision course with fate. How was it she had left him behind so easily?
No, not easily, she thinks ruefully, running a hand through her mess of hair shakily. She hasn't left him behind so easily. There is still something of him with her, something almost so tangible there are moments when she feels like she could reach out and touch him again. Foolish moments. Her heart can't take much more of those.
What heart? she says to herself softly, reveling in the empty irony of it all. There is nearly nothing of that left.
Five years is a long time to be groping at the past. So Captain Eclipse closes her eyes and takes a shuddering breath, knowing fully well she will be woken up in a matter of hours by those gruesome screams. They will only stop when the morning comes.
But there is no morning in space. There is no ray of sunshine to break the cold, dark horizon and shed light on a hopeful scene. No, there is only empty, empty, icy darkness in a sea of complete nothingness.
Is this what it's like to be alive?
This can't possibly be death.
There is too much nothingness, too much airiness, for this to legitimately be the end. Surely, if it were the end you would have felt it. There would be some note of finality, a stiffly typed the end at the conclusion of your tale, not a to be continued. There must be more. There has to be more.
But the more this idea resounds in the darkness, the more pain it brings back to you. The pain is jarring, unbearable, and you shy away. You have felt nothing, been nothing, for so long. How can you deal with this alien touch, this alien pain? You would give anything to stop it. Anything to go back to your former existence of being nothing. This pain is worse than anything else imaginable.
Sounds now, loudly, lash against your mind; images so bright and fleeting, all, all swirling in a cacophony of intense agony that pulse inside of you. Pulse. How long since something has pulsed inside of you? It hurts. You'd rather not know.
Grief. Sorrow. Pain. Anguish. Darkness. Coldness. Torment. Agony. Blinding, blinding, agony, all swirling and crashing and thundering inside of you. Like waves breaking against a cliff in fury, like blaster fire ringing around a room, hot knives pressing against your skin. Never ending, ever growing, thrashing agony.
And then—
"Will I ever see you again?"
And the most terrible pain yet, breaks even. There is too much pain, too much feeling left.
No, you can't possibly be dead.
A/n: I'm not so sure about uploading this piece so soon, but I've been itching to write something, anything, for this fandom. Ever since I saw the ending of Force Unleashed I've been dying to get my hands on this pairing and well, this is what I have to show for it.
Now, is this just a one-shot, or will it be multi-chaptered? All I can say is maybe. There is a rough story line in my head for where this could possibly all be going, but as I'm a complete novice at all of the Star Wars jargon and have only the video game as reference—I understand there's a book? I don't know if I could trust myself, knowing what the ending is, to read it…—I'm not entirely sure if I should continue. Your thoughts on the matter?
As always, thanks for reading. An even bigger thank you for reviews! :)
UndeniablyMe ;)