Disclaimer: Still own nothing, it belongs to Lucas.
A/N: Thank you to those that reviewed, I'm glad people enjoyed it. What do you know, I still feel good about this story. Enjoy.
Walk with Shadows: Chapter two
He sat alone in the darkened room; the blaring red numbers on the wall told him it was approaching nightfall. 'A few more minutes, I still have a few more minutes,' he consoled himself, not really believing it. Elbows resting on the desk, his head in his hands and foot tapping on the floor, it was all he could do not to start pacing. 'Nothing. How can there be nothing?'
Derrick rubbed the balls of his palms into his sore eyes before leaning back into his chair to stare at the offending screen. The impossible results of the blood work looked right back. No pathogens, free of disease and illness. No abnormal markers. White cells and red cells both normal. No foreign bodies or parasites. Scans of the body showed old injuries in the sternum, six ribs, the right fibula and the aftermath of a shattered left hip. All organs were functioning naturally. A brain scan had completed the picture of a trauma long healed. Cracks had once run the length of the skulls surface with an indication that the left of the temporal lobe had taken the brunt of the impact. There had almost certainly been brain damage.
That was not what was causing the patients catatonic state, however. If the patient's previous injuries, which seem to have occurred between four and seven years ago given the state wear on the healed segments, had turned her into a vegetable, a far larger degree of muscle loss and bone degradation would be seen. It wasn't present. Also, brain activity was consistent with someone who was asleep, periods of a deep sleep followed light. 'The medical officer had said she hadn't stirred in the four days she had been on board,' he mentally sighed as he thought it over once again, 'that her physical condition had only been improving.'
He remembered days in his early years, when he first entered the academy, when no matter how he tried, no matter which way he approached the problem, he couldn't find the answer. He felt like that now, stressed and ignorant, the exam tomorrow. The answer was there, he only needed to look, but time was slipping away, running ever faster. His shift was ending and his wife had brought tickets to the opera. 'She would understand,' he told himself and almost believed it. He knew he couldn't do that to her once more. Too many lonely nights on Coruscant had put enough strain on his marriage as it was.
He would go, but his mind would not leave this room, puzzles had always been his problem. The opera would play out before him, his wife would smile and clutch his hand and all he would see were the factures snaking out from the temporal lobe. The numbers on the walled ticked over once more and he knew it was past time to leave. Quickly he closed down the files on patient HJS-253 and went to his locker to get changed.
Even at this hour, the hospital moved on its smoothly greased axels. He walked past droids pushing carts laden with meals, past cleaning droids, past families been gently but firmly told that visiting hours were finishing. A nurse in full surgical attire walked by quickly, briefly piquing his interest, 'Another accident come too emergency, then.'
As he strolled past the nurse's station a few waved in farewell, one even wished him a good evening but none battered an eyelash as he walked past the corner that led to the exit. 'What would be worse,' he pondered, 'someone finding the answer while I'm off duty, or still trying to figure it out a week from now?' He had no idea.
Hands in pockets, he turned down another brightly lit corridor that was in stark contrast to the encroaching darkness creeping over the night sky. Airspeeders would soon only be visible via their lights. He turned another corner and nodded his head to a security guard that walked past. He wanted one more look. Mysteries were meant to be looked at, to be studied.
When he finally came to her room, though, nothing was as he expected. The bed was empty, a nearly naked nurse was unconscious on the floor and a droid was letting of small puffs of smoke in the corner as sparks flared. "That surgical nurse," he muttered, eyes wide, frozen, his mind jolted, "she was heading in the opposite direction to emergency…"
With one last look at the unmoving nurse Derrick was running. He wife would have to wait after all. It wasn't until days later that he thought to check the blood sample for a midichlorian count, but by then she was long gone.
She walked a near aimless path through a city full of roads that to her led nowhere. The unforgiving rumble of the city surrounded her. It catered to her mood, dank, dark and...lost. Not once did she receive a second look as she moved through the crowds, clothes borrowed from lockers at the hospital helped with some of that. Her hooded cloak purchased with pilfered credits did the rest. Coruscant's sun was just cresting its horizon, and it was that she walked towards more than anything. Dawn would end a night of torment.
'Four thousand years,' the words echoed in her skull, always accompanied by silence. An airspeeder pulled out of Coruscants sky and landed before her, causing her to divert her path. As she squeezed by she trailed her hand lazily along the wall, eyes deep in her hood marvelled as her fingers collected dust, leaving streaks in their wake. 'So long, so long…'
She came around a bend and sunlight caressed her for the first time. Its embrace was welcomed; its comfort the first she had experienced since fleeing questions that she dared not answer. Nothing was as it had been, everything had changed, yet its familiarity stung her. Look forward or back far enough, and we always come to the same point, always revisit the same place. It had always been an abstract concept, a lesson half learned. 'It was not meant to be lived,' she whispered, 'never lived.'
The Force flowed on this planet in what she could only think of as cautious anticipation. Its streams were great and multifaceted, life…was everywhere. Its spark was a deluge that battered her soul. Any direction she could look, and there would be millions. Except not a single one was recognisable. They were all gone. The Force watched her, and waited for the inevitable.
Revan Du Sal: The Prodigal Knight.
'There exists no complete record of one of histories most notorious Jedi. While the temple may be the lone exception, access to their database was not granted. What follows will attempt to focus on fact over fiction and present at best a hypothetical explanation of the actions of a Jedi that the Republic should feel forever grateful left for the unknown regions never to return.'
She paid it no heed; she was an island, immune to its constant ebbing. Her shielding in place, she isolated herself the best she knew how. Both the bright and dark lurked on Coruscant, she felt their presence but cared not. The light side tried to reach out and claim her. The darkness stood at the edge of her shielding laughing manically as it shrieked, 'Who are you? Who are you?' She ignored both.
Normally she could have kept the Force quiet but her scattered mind was struggling to just move her battered body safely through the streets. At the moment, all else was beyond her. An hour out of the hospital and she realised she might just have belonged there. Resilience built up over many years had deserted her. Her legs strained to carry out her wishes, her arms felt weak and heavy. Complications of too many years of immobility, she knew. Machines and the Force could only do so much. Her hip, repaired years ago after Malak fired on her ship and since forgotten, was a bundle of tight nerves that pinched at every step.
Ahead the street opened into a broad square, buildings towered to the sky on every side acting like an impenetrable wall, at its centre stood a statue of bronze. The street she walked continued on the opposite side of the open ground, the sun now a flaring crescent that spilled directly down her promenade and into the plaza, casting long shadows. She walked ever toward it.
'A student of promise, she learned all that was put before her until she could no longer ignore the drums of war. Had she been able too, the Mandalorians may have been all that troubled the Republic for generations and Revan may have fallen into obscurity like so many others. As it was she ran to the fire and it became an inferno.'
She saw them in her mind as she walked, companions whose memory was all but forgotten, now only footnotes to her life. She had left them behind once, but had always hoped to see them again. Then it had been something that she had tried not to contemplate as she worked on the vessel that would make them forever unreachable. She'd had a choice, in a way. To ignore everything she had ever worked for and return too them or continue. More than once she had faltered, only the cold certainty that the Republic would be destroyed if she failed to act kept her working. Despite its flaws, she valued that more than anything.
'Liar', a voice that she recognised as a Dark Lords taunted, 'you were no longer who they thought you were, you never were. You had nowhere you belonged, you had nowhere to go.' She shied away from that voice but did not deny it. Long ago she had realised that they had taken everything from her, every thought, every emotion was tainted. How could she ever be sure of her own mind again, how did she know she was herself? Memories and passions constantly collided in her skull. Her companions, she missed, but like so much else she could not trust those feelings. "They did this to me," she whispered, and the anger that had been simmering for hours finally reached her soul.
'…destruction greater than any that had preceded it, she brought back with her from the Star Forge, her fall so complete it would influence the Sith for millennia. Two wars she stopped, one that was of her own making, and three she was responsible for, two of which occurred long after she perished in the heart of Sith space.'
In the night she had found a public access terminal in a deserted archive, only to be stunned at what she had found. Her life, summed up in a few short paragraphs, outlined betrayal, war and murder on a scale so large as to name her the eternal sinner. The Mandalorians were made to look like floundering children, what they called the Jedi Civil War an act of pettiness and greed. They laid at her feet the Great War that occurred three hundred years after her 'death' as the hidden Sith Empire attacked, and the actions of Darth Bane thousands of years later after he found a holocron not designed for him.
'They blame me for the threat I had sensed in the unknown regions materialising?' she clenched her hands into fists and two windows to her left exploded. 'They ignore the fact that I left the republic intact,' in the distance, at the other end of the square, a man dressed in flowing robes caught her eye, 'overlooked or unseen is the reality that without my 'civil' war and the regulations and protocols put in place as a result, the Great War would have lasted days and its end…' She was moving before any conscious thought had entered her mind.
'…had she not set out into the unknown regions, where it can be safely assumed she met her ultimate demise, who would have woken the Sith Empire? There is also the Idleberg hypothesis to consider, that Revan sought just that when she left, to rouse the Sith and unleash them against the Republic in an act of revenge as she once again became who she really was, Dark Lord of the Sith, the Prodigal Knight the true illusion.'
The crowd melted before her as she snarled. The Jedi, with his short cropped white hair and long beard, came into view once more, his small party moving off into the markets. 'I did nothing but sow chaos and deceit in the empire after the Force whispered, I brought three hundred years, without me...' her thoughts trailed off, it was unnecessary to continue. Everything, even how she was remembered, had been taken from her; left to rot by the Jedi, and that fed her fury. Now would she take their chosen one and call it even? 'Was that why I came here? To deny them his presence in their temple?' She knew she wanted the chosen one, and thought she knew why, but she had been wrong before.
She was walking behind them now, even the Jedi oblivious to her presence. She smirked. For the moment she kept pace, walking just out of the shadows they cast, waiting. On both sides of the street stalls were open and sentients of all descriptions were showing their wares. She saw Bith, Duros, Twi'lek, Rodain and others, even a few species she didn't recognise. Mostly though, she ignored them. The Jedi's presence in the Force was what she focused on, what drew her. It was weak but bright, a strong yellow flecked with purple and white. At his right hip her eye caught a glint of silver and she moved, her tiredness forgotten as she drew on the Force.
The Jedi flinched, but it was too late. Her hand snapped forward, the Force bursting from her in an unrestrained torrent. Like a tornado touching down in the middle of a city without warning, chaos exploded in the marketplace. The Jedi and his companions were knocked straight up in the air, merchandise burst from stands, market stalls shattered, their pieces flung in all directions. Passers-by were knocked from their feet, others dropping to the ground to avoid flying debris. More tripped as the tried to run.
Just as the first shouts began to fill the air her hand closed around the cold hilt of the Lightsaber, she unclipped it from his belt and brought it behind the back of the now falling Jedi. The darkness swirled around her as her mind screamed. 'Why was this done to me?' The world seemed to slow, the seconds stretch as her thumb lingered over the ignition switch. If her shaking hand ignited the blade…the Jedi would no longer have a heart.
'When the topic of Revan Du Sal is researched invariably an anonymous quote is often uncovered. Reasoning attributes it to one of the Jedi that was present on Dantooine, the location of a Jedi training enclave prior to its bombardment and the construction of the Temple on Coruscant after the Great War. 'Revan was power. It was like staring into the heart of the Force.' While a clear indication of her ability, the most disturbing aspect of that quote is perhaps that it lends weight to the argument that the best of the Jedi often become the enemies of the Republic. It was certainly true of the Jedi of her era.'
Her breathing loud in her own ears, her mind reeled as she watched the Jedi slowly descend, his robes billowing. Instead of ignition she slipped the entire length of the Lightsaber up her sleeve, her free hand swung around onto the Jedi's chest as he fell past her hip, a pulse of the Force discharging on contact leaving him stunned even before he hit the ground and bounced. With effort she forced the darkness away and her anger went with it, leaving her alone to face the reality of what she had done.
Eyes wide, her chest heaving, all she could do was stare down at the Jedi as people fled in all directions, their screams going with them. 'What am I doing?' Her mind began to work again, slowly but it worked. 'Kill a nameless Jedi? I have never done that without reason, I never even hurt without reason.' It was then that the sounds of heavy footsteps filled her ears, dimly at first but coming closer. Up the street, outlined by the rising sun, a squad of security personal was coming her way.
She started backing away slowly, her eyes going over their heads and towards the sun, towards where she had been told the Jedi Temple now stood. 'Later, it would have to be later.' She turned and ran, her hip once again howling in pain as Coruscant's constant dull murmur engulfed her once more. He was not here, or even on any of the core worlds, that much she could sense. How she would find him, she was not sure. What the Force seemed to be suggesting was unusual to say the least. It would take time. But that was fine. With one last glance over her shoulder at the destroyed marketplace and stunned Jedi that the security forces were just now getting to, she knew she needed it.
A/N: Hope it was interesting…until later. Oh and that quote came from KOTOR 2 by they way, I don't mean to steal anything.