LAST LOVE SONG

'Then strike me down, Bastila. I won't defend myself.'

The words lingered like smoke in the air, burnt into her heart with the intensity with which they were spoken. She lifted her head, looking up at the endless sea of stars beyond, her dishevelled hair falling in waves over her shoulders as she moved. On Dantooine, during the long years after the Great Hyperspace War, she had spent endless hours watching the stars, her blank eyes fixed far beyond the sparks of distant light representing the far off worlds of Taris, Tatooine, Kashyyyk, Korriban and Manaan. She wondered now, in light of everything that had taken place, if it would not have been more merciful to have lived without regaining knowledge of the varied and multitude planets that lead the way to the Rakatan Star Forge.

But mercy had not been the quality the Jedi Council had had in mind when they had reconditioned her, pulling at the strands of her wounded mind from the wreckage of her flesh.

'You are not evil, Bastila. You will not strike down a defenceless opponent.'

If not for the Star Forge, if not for her own desire then maybe events could have changed, perhaps the path she had walked could have resulted in less death and carnage...perhaps the universe could have been spared the legacy of Darth Revan.

She looked at herself in the transparent plasteel of the window, seeing the sharp lines of her face, the dark hair pulled seriously back from her high forehead and the ellipse of her eyes and thin lines of her mouth; the face that lived for so long behind a black masque of stolen Mandalorian armour.

'Now you see the Dark Side is not stronger than the light.'

She had spoken those words, the platitudes of the Jedi Code she had once been so contemptuous of spilling easily from her dry lips as she had confronted Bastila within the command centre of the Star Forge.

'I could never kill you, Bastila. You can reject the Dark Side, Bastila. Return to the light.'

As the words had drifted effortlessly from her, filling the space between them in the cold air of the ancient death machine, she had wondered then, as she did now, what it had been like before her initial fall, in the years of her youth when she had first been accepted into training by the Council. Since the Forge's destruction and the death of her own former apprentice, Darth Malak, she had ruminated on the events of her absent past, even asking Master Vandar for guidance. The diminutive Jedi Master had remained typically evasive of the matter, sidestepping the subject at every turn.

It had been through painstaking study and meditation that she had been able to reclaim anything of her former life, retracting her steps from the Star Forge and Rakatan maps that had marked its location. The scraps that had returned to her had been less than nothing, the first letter of a name or the faint smell of a forgotten location. Again she looked at the narrow face that stared back at her from the sea of stars.

Before her assignment aboard the Endar Spire she was nothing. The moment of waking, the torrential bombardment by Malak's forces and the death of Trask had all conspired to give birth to her new personality in the most excruciatingly painful way imaginable. Before that there was nothing, the silence of the void.

'Use our bond, then. Take your strength from me.'

The words washed over her like ice water. She remembered the way Bastila had looked, her thin body wrapped within the robes of a Dark Jedi Master, her eyes glistening with tears and her eyelids painted black by make up. A cynical smile crossed her thin lips, reflected back at her in the plasteel. Even when consumed by the darkest urges of the Force Bastila had still sought to make an impression on her, the mixed signals of one uncertain and yet determined at the same time.

'I love you, Bastila. I can't abandon you, ever.'

With those words the course of history had changed. Despite themselves it had been the Council on Dantooine that had originally spoke to her of redemption, of the idea that no matter how consumed by darkness a soul became there was still redemption; redemption without death. Through this lesson, despite the assuming tone in which it was intended, she had mustered the courage to let go her own heart and invalidate the Jedi Code, to reach out to Bastila and bring her out of the darkness, not with serenity but with passion. It was this same lesson that had persuaded her to reclaim her old name: Revan. Though at first there had been concern she had remained firm in her conviction. A month after the Star Forge she had deconstructed her lightsabre, removing the three crystals at the core of the weapon and breaking the hilt into its component parts. Bastila had done the same and, together, they had delivered the parts to Vandar. A symbolic gesture considering that the knowledge earned to reconstruct further lightsabres was not lost to either of them.

'I trust you enough to leave myself open to your attack, Bastila.'

She could not have predicted how deep the root of such words went when first she had encountered the arrogant, young Jedi, ignobly caged and restrained by the Black Vulkar gang on Taris. Not only had she lowered her lightsabre but also the defences of her heart. The bond that had entwined their fates since the death of her former identity had turned to love, that most passionate of emotions so espoused as the moral corruptor of countless Jedi.

There had been so much blood in the way of them, so much hurt and death. Now, with everything behind them, the old traditions had failed to fill the void. She felt the warmth of a hand upon her shoulder and looked up, seeing the concerned lines of Bastila's face reflected alongside her own in the plasteel window. The past 48 hours had been painful for her. Despite the efforts of Coruscant's finest surgeons there had been nothing that could be done to stop the spread of illness within Bastila's mother, Helena. The most they had been able to give her, the one small mercy and respite from disease was a peaceful death in slumber.

"How do you feel?" Revan asked, taking in the tears that still bristled at the corner of Bastila's dark eyes and the large mug of hot chocolate in her free hand.

The former Jedi smiled weakly, an act noticeable for its scarcity over the past few weeks.

"I came out here to ask you the same thing, actually." She remarked, easily falling into the oft-misinterpreted defensive tone that hid the deeper sorrow of her emotions.

Revan reached out and touched the other woman's arm, her hand causing bristles on the exposed flesh and such trembling that for a moment she feared Bastila would drop the mug of hot chocolate to the floor.

The tears escaped Bastila's eyes, running in warm lines down her cheeks. The hot chocolate finally dropped from her hand, the ceramic of the mug shattering as the two women embraced. As she cradled the grief stricken woman the words of the Jedi Code drifted back into memory.

'There is no emotion, there is peace.'

She ground her teeth together, feeling the closeness of the other woman as she sobbed gently in her arms.

'I love you and I believe in you.'

The myth was dead, the legacy uprooted and expunged.

"There are no Jedi," Revan whispered, kissing Bastila gently on the neck. "Only people."

Outside, the stars continued to shine down on them.