We're ignoring the comics and any new lore from The Old Republic, playing fast and loose with canon and filling in the gaps where it feels right.
A Jedi's first duty was to those around them.
That was what Jedi Knight Meetra Surik believed, with all her heart. And it was why, immediately after handing in her mission report, she made a beeline for Revan. Following the buzzing knot of frustration in the Force on the other side of the Dantooine enclave was almost reflex.
Of course, the council approved stance on a Jedi's first duty, the stance that had been drummed into her head since she was an infant, was that a Jedi's first duty was to the Force. There were some counter arguments about answering to the code first, and you could get partial marks for saying they answered to the Republic first, but then you would get lost in the weeds of political models and social structure.
It all sounded like excuses to her. You had the most influence on the people closest to you, and what you poured into them they could pour onward into others, an eternal web of influence and responsibility stretching out across the entire galaxy.
Or perhaps she was just too idealistic. That was certainly what Atris thought, whenever they indulged in philosophical talk over tea.
She passed through the campus and headed out into the fields. The sun was bright orange, hanging low in the sky, and shining directly into her eyes.
She probably ought to have been meditating, releasing the stress of her recent mission into the Force.
It hadn't gone that badly. The end result wasn't bad at least, a resolution to the mining colony's bitter power struggles had been reached, one that all parties agreed to. But blood had been needlessly spilled nevertheless.
She'd had to clean dried flakes of it out of the nooks and crannies of her lightsaber hilt.
She wasn't ready to think about it.
Revan on the other hand was clearly thinking strongly about something. She'd known him long enough that she could feel the rumble of frustration regardless of how strong his mental shielding had grown of late. Had something happened? What was wrong?
Brown grass crunched beneath her boots. Tiny white and red flowers swayed around her knees, and a Kath hound sleeping in the grass looked up at her passing. A cool evening breeze swept over the gentle hills, carrying the familiar scent of a Dantooine summer and the hum of the living Force. It felt like being welcomed home.
In the shadow of a boab tree, Revan paced.
His black hair, dark brown skin, and cream robes stood out against the washed out peach of the declining day. Weak blue holograms floated around him, and he held his hands behind his back as he walked a track into the battered grass. She felt more than saw the scowl of deep thought on his face, most likely looking very severe in the blue light of what she now saw to be a star map and a glowing holocron. A familiar one too.
She huffed a breath as she recognised it. And here she'd been bracing for a disaster.
He paused in his pacing and looked at her with a broad smile before she could say anything. It made her feel marginally better.
"Em! How was the mission?" he called and greeted her with a hug. He gave good hugs, despite being over six foot of solid muscle. "Took you long enough, we were starting to worry."
"It can't have been that long," she replied, pulling back to gesture at the holograms, "if you're still working on the holocron project."
He huffed a breath and cast a narrow eyed look at the holocron. "It would have been done already, if the old fool of a master wasn't wrong ."
"Mm-hm," Meetra raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. "What's he so wrong about now?"
He didn't need further encouragement.
She took a seat leaning against the base of the tree and let his words flow over her. He paced, gestured with his arms and pointed accusingly at the holocron. It was a familiar experience, Revan had always prefered to work through his thoughts out loud when he felt strongly about something, and she was just contrary enough to goad him into it when he clammed up. She thought it helped him. That made her feel better too.
They had been younglings at the enclave together and stayed close, even after they went their separate ways as padawans, he to join his first master on Coruscant and she to hers on the outer rim. They were both knights now, with enough experience beneath their belts to no longer be deemed untested, but still settling into their respective careers.
He was again answering to his first master now, the order's head archivist, as he angled for a high research position. He had a knack for tracking down artefacts, both light and dark, and a fiendishly clever mind that never stopped working. If he got the position it wasn't going to be because Master Kae held any favouristm for her apprentices, there were few positions as punishing as the centre of Kae's attention, or so Meetra had heard. She'd only seen the Master in holovids of the high council.
Revan flourished under her anyway. He always did like a challenge, and Kae presented no lack of them.
His current project was an unofficial punishment from her: he had done something rather silly on a recent mission. She had assigned him the task of transcribing an old master's thesis on Exar Kun's campaign in the Sith war, after the holocron that kept it was damaged.
Revan had complained about the assignment for days even before Meetra left for her mission, not because the subject was boring, but because he disagreed vehemently with the old master and wanted to argue at every turn. Meetra privately thought that was why Master Kae had assigned him the task in the first place: had it been something less interesting he would have designed a droid to interface with the holocron and likely be done by the end of the day.
It had been weeks.
"I think I might put my own thesis on hold so I can publish a refutation," he said, scowling at the damaged holocron. "This kind of misinformation is dangerous." The Jedi master's fractured image likely would have scowled back if it could.
Meetra hummed noncommittally. She didn't think he actually would, he'd picked his own subject, the effect of wider cultural trends on the Jedi code, for a reason. There would be no real benefit to arguing with a dead master about the stratagems of a sith who had been dead for even longer. Nobody cared. Nobody's path would be altered no matter how well he made his point.
He fell quiet, looking thoughtfully at the long patch of grass he'd beaten down. He had probably thought it through to the same conclusion she did. He never did like feeling like he wasn't making a difference. Probably why they understood each other so well.
She leaned her head back against the tree's smooth trunk.
"You're going to be so bored as a researcher, Revan."
"I will not," he replied, mild. "I love this work. There's always something new to uncover."
"But who will read your papers?"
His shoulders squared. "Many, I'm sure."
"...will they?" she asked, quietly, and feeling like a bit of a schutta for it.
He cut his eyes at her. "Don't project too hard, Em."
She looked down.
"Besides, I'm going to be a field researcher," he said, undaunted. "More than filling holocrons with rambling, I'll be leading expeditions into live combat zones to document ancient ruins before they're destroyed, that sort of thing."
"Excellent use of the passive voice, my friend. 'Before they are destroyed.' As though proximity to combat makes ancient ruins simply explode, unprompted."
He tsked. "I didn't plant the landmines!"
"Oh? What did you do with the landmines?"
"Oh, come off it, I've already gotten this lecture from Kae." He dragged a hand through his short hair, catching on the curls. "I'm amazed she didn't sentence me to some arctic wilderness to dig up artefacts that aren't even there as payback."
"You'd enjoy it too much."
His lip twitched. "Probably."
The sun inched closer to the horizon. The light lost its golden sheen and the wind whistled softly by.
"Did you come here straight from the landing pad?" he asked.
She shook her head.
Revan watched her with an expectant look. She felt his presence poke her ever so gently. She'd been told that she came across as very serene in the Force, at peace with herself as every jedi ought to be. And yet he always saw through her. It was a nuisance.
"You know, I think the old master's right," she said, and stood up. "Exar Kun wasted his forces on Raxus Prime."
Revan's eyes narrowed at her sudden subject change, but he took up the distraction anyway. He adjusted the holo-projector, reset the map of the invasion and they settled into a practised debate format. He had studied strategy but she was no slouch: her missions were not research, she worked in disaster relief.
The fields grew dark around them and little glowing insects flew up from the soil and buzzed in the night.
He won the argument, which was irritating, she thought she had a good point, but she got a kick out of the debate nevertheless. He did too, the ball of righteous indignation within him had diffused by the time they wound down.
She clicked off the little holoprojector and he closed down the holocron.
"That's probably enough stalling, don't you think?" he said.
"Hm?"
He gave her a look.
"How was your mission?"
She sighed. She let the irritation of being cornered recede back into the Force. There was a knot of something worse in her core, but she wasn't ready to deal with that. They headed back towards the enclave together.
He bumped her with his shoulder when she didn't say anything.
She shrugged. "I got it done."
"That bad?"
"I didn't blow up any ancient ruins."
He scoffed. She smiled.
"What happened, Em?"
She'd trusted the wrong person. Or perhaps they had, given how surprised they looked to find her lightsaber buried in their abdomen. How could they have been surprised, after turning on her and everything she stood for?
But she had given them her word that she was not against them. That she was not there to harm them. They believed her and acted with confidence because of it.
Which of them was the gullible fool, when the smoke cleared?
"I should probably meditate," she admitted, stalling at the edge of the courtyard to the residential block.
Revan nodded. "Probably."
She sighed.
He patted her on the shoulder and headed in, leaving her there. She headed towards the meditation chambers. The weight of a long day travelling and the mission were starting to wear her down.
The main buildings of the enclave were quiet and empty at this hour. She walked the paths alone.
She found herself envying Revan. Just a little. He always seemed so sure, even when re-examining himself or questioning his own motivations. Her own path lacked the clarity he saw in his future. She was a competent enough knight, as far as her own judgement could be trusted. She hadn't botched any missions or gotten herself blacklisted from any major systems, which was more than Alek could boast. And yet...
As Revan forged ahead with a clear destination in mind, bulldozing through mountains and building bridges without hesitation, she felt as though she were simply wandering, following the rise and fall of the land. There was stunning scenery along the way, but it remained to be seen whether or not she was actually going somewhere. Perhaps she was taking the scenic route to a dead end.
She shook her head at herself. Every successful mission meant countless lives saved or at least bettered. Considering that a waste of time was self-involved nonsense. She should know better.
She thought of the lives she had ended on her successful mission. They had thought themselves so righteous.
The meditation chambers were perfectly silent as she entered. The hush of the place swallowed up her footsteps as she walked along the halls.
Only one chamber was occupied. She felt the familiar presence rising like a mountain in the Force, solid and steady.
She paused at the door to an empty room. It's scattered cushions and hard floor looked cold and sterile. There would be nothing but her own thoughts in there.
She turned and went to the occupied room, sticking her head in the door.
Alek levitated in the center of the room, his eyes closed and hands flat on the knees of his crossed legs. Stray cushions floated around him. She leaned against the door jam and crossed her arms.
"Hey," she whispered.
There was a long stretch of quiet.
"Hey," he called, from the depths of meditation.
"Wanna get beat up?"
His lips twitched. He cracked open a single eye.
She smiled angelically at him.
Fighting Alek was like fighting an avalanche.
He had height, reach, strength, and a propensity for sudden, terrifying intensity in his assaults. There was no time to breath, no time to think. He carried only one lightsaber to her two, but could be so overwhelming as to make her feel slow and clumsy.
What Meetra did have was the ability to shake off an absolute beating.
He circled her, and she braced herself for another round. Their lightsabers were turned down to lowest strength, but she still felt the burns and bruises. He was feeling them too, if the way he was favouring his left leg was anything to go by.
They were alone in the training hall, under a single white light. Darkness enveloped the edges of the room.
He launched himself at her, battering at her defences. He brought his lightsaber down with all his strength and a kind of savagery that got him sideways looks from the masters.
It was wholly different from the calm and quiet jedi he was the rest of the time. He was awkward and often ashamed of the things people said about whatever demons they thought he exorcised in combat. Never mind that he was one of the strongest duelists in the order.
He struggled to find sparring partners these days.
Meetra launched an attack of her own when he withdrew. His energy was starting to lag. She had him beat there, her endurance was her greatest strength. Openings crept into his defences. She swept his legs out from under him.
He rolled and retreated. She gave chase. He came roaring back with a sudden burst of energy. Her arm gave out under a blow. She had to retreat, barely fending him off with her off hand sabre. She scowled. She should have known better than to think he was spent already.
His expression was completely focused.
It wasn't rage that fuelled him in those moments, regardless of what some whispered. She privately thought it might have been some kind of personal battle meditation, a clarity of purpose he only found when the fighting was at its worst. Regardless, the calmness of the forces' eternal peace, it was not. He'd saved her life in the field too many times for her to care.
She centered herself, and raised her defences again. The grief within her slipped away, there simply wasn't room for it when her life was on the line. Alek unleashed himself at her again, and again, and again. She knocked him down and took a victory. He gave her a fierce smile and hauled himself back up. He kicked her in the chest and she fell down hard. A burning blue sabre caught her under the chin. She let out a hiss.
He stepped back to let her up.
She reignited her sabres and swung them around to an offensive position.
He took up his stance, his arms starting to shake, and his tattooed, bald head shiny with sweat. He was grinning.
The next morning they were both covered in purpling bruises. Alek walked with a limp. Master Vandar shook his head and sighed. Revan laughed at them.
Meetra did eventually meditate on her regret and accept that all was the will of the Force. More or less.
It was a pill she never did like swallowing, who could claim to truly understand the will of the Force? Who was she to decide that people she failed to save had secretly been chosen to die all along?
She took her thoughts to Atris, a newly appointed historian at the Dantooine libraries, and a budding traditionalist. Meetra rather liked the young woman, even if she was a little naive. She was delighted to quote a great many old texts at Meetra on the subject of the will of the force. Meetra quoted a great many others back at her.
"We guide the force, Atris, as much as it does us," she said. "Otherwise what is the point of having Jedi at all?"
Atris pursed her lips in thought. "We cannot both be guiding each other or we would simply be walking in circles."
Meetra smiled for a moment. "Who is to say we are not?"
Atris opened her mouth.
"History?" Meetra challenged.
Atris snapped her mouth shut again. She frowned. "Which of us here is the historian, hm?"
"Ah, my apologies, grand master archivist, I forget my place," Meetra said with a grin and a hand over her heart.
Atris' cheeks coloured. "Don't be ridiculous. There are dozens of other Jedi with seniority between myself and that position. I'm much too young."
Meetra raised her eyebrows at that. She took a sip of her tea instead of engaging. There was a lot of jockeying for position in the more academic sides of the order she simply didn't have to deal with as a working sentinel.
"Nevertheless, Meetra," Atris said, recollecting herself. "We must all accept that there are losses and sacrifices to be made. Did not Master Ollun Tal say that the life of a Jedi is in itself a sacrifice?"
Meetra hummed. She wasn't sure she was comfortable with an untested consular who rarely left Dantooine preaching the necessity of sacrifice. But then Meetra herself was still young, perhaps she sounded just as naive to the masters around them.
"What can we do but trust the Force?" she said.
Atris raised a tea cup to that.
Meetra wandered along her path, seeing the sights and covering ground at a leisurely pace. She worked her missions all across the outer rim and nothing very much ever seemed to change. Dantooine welcomed her home to quiet reflection and familiar faces time and again.
Meetra settled into it.
Then the Mandalorians invaded.
The attacks started in the outer rim, the unprotected and least economically valuable worlds to the Republic. Reports flooded in, the Force echoed and pulled against the slaughter. The Mandalorians gained a foothold. The attack became a war.
The Jedi council forbade any members of the order from joining the fight.
A new path appeared before Meetra.
Peaceful worlds burned. Entire systems starved as the Mandalorians took control of the hyperlanes and intercepted supply ships.
The path led straight through a mountain, face first into something that would likely take everything from her. She felt that perhaps she ought to have been scared. She wasn't. It was unthinkable that she would do anything else. A lifetime of old worries seemed meaningless now. They fell away from her.
Revan left on a mission to investigate the sudden radio silence from an outer rim world. She felt him burn with righteous conviction on the other side of the galaxy at the sight of the destruction, the violation. He stood and swore to end it.
He asked her to join him. It wasn't even a choice.
Alek too answered the call. Atris didn't, but she said she understood. Others did not, her old masters begged her to stay, to think again. Some turned their backs on her, some walked in step. The Jedi order tore itself in half.
Meetra followed Revan into war.
The first battles were punishing. It showed them all exactly how much they didn't know. Meetra was a quick learner. So was Revan.
The Mandalorians craved combat and had no interest in weak opponents. Revan gave them a strong enemy and they stopped wasting firepower on civilian populations. The fighting, ruthless enough to begin with, grew fiercer still.
The Republic army swelled its ranks as word spread that Jedi were fighting with them.
Revan's strategies grew more cunning, and more ruthless. Meetra argued with him but she couldn't argue with the resultss. The Mandalorians were slowly pushed back. The things the enemy stooped to made her hate them.
Revan grew more ruthless still. She didn't argue so much. She had her own ship, and then later her own fleet to worry about, she took her orders and made the most of them. They all had their victories and losses. She could no longer sense Revan's mood in the Force, she could barely sense him at all under the mental shields he built. He still gave her the courtesy of removing his helmet when they spoke. She still trusted him.
The Republic gave her and Alek the title of General, and they gave Revan total control of the whole war effort.
He made the Mandalorians fear them.
Alek reveled in it. The sweet awkwardness that once defined him fell away. He was stronger than he had ever been before, and Revan let him break his opponents however he pleased, so long as he got results. He always got results. Meetra didn't recognise him anymore. She didn't recognise herself anymore either. She, too, always got results.
Without prompting Revan began to place her and Alek on different battlefields, and she focused on her own work.
Her strength and senses grew, stretching out to cover all her commanders, captains, and lieutenants, then her pilots and engineers and gunners and medics and troopers. Every life a glowing point within her and spread out across the fleet. She knew she was too attached, but at this point she had broken so many other tenants of the code it seemed a minor point. She fought fiercely alongside them, guided them out of sieges and ambushes, and got them through hell. She felt the visceral love they had for her. She loved them in turn.
When a young zabrak engineer came to her with a proposal for a weapon that manipulated a planet's gravity, to weaponize its mass shadow, she encouraged him. She allocated funds for the project. She asked all her soldiers to challenge themselves, and granted them a large amount of autonomy. She didn't bother telling Revan, there were always countless weapons in development and he had bigger worries.
In the orbit around Malachor V, surrounded by the ships of her allies and enemies, Meetra found her destination.
Revan duelled Mandalore the Ultimate on the bridge of his dying flagship on the other side of a moon. Rows of lights on the flagship flickered out as the power was cut and whole decks went dark.
Meetra reordered own fleet, she was pinningthe Mandalore's forces down around the planet. She'd lost contact with two of her commanders after the control tower of their ship went down, but she could feel them still. They were getting desperate. They wouldn't be able to hold the enemy back for much longer.
She looked to Revan's ship. It's shields were all down. Hers would soon follow.
He was going to win the duel, she could feel it reverberating through the Force even at this distance. It wouldn't be enough though, the Mandalorians wouldn't recognise it as a defeat if the ship went down before it was confirmed, not if Revan himself didn't survive.
She saw it in her mind's eye for a split second, the Force echoing harsh and foreboding around her. The war would drag on, with no clear path to victory for either side if this battle wasn't decisive. The Republic would bleed itself dry trying to fund it, lesser and lesser leaders taking up the mantle of Mandalore until their forces had fought to the very last man.
Fire exploded against the black backdrop, one of her hammerhead ships losing power under bombardment. Mandalorian fighters swarmed it. They were running out of chances.
The zabrak engineer presented her with a weapon.
She looked into his grim but proud face.
"The planet's size is just right," he said, holding out the controls to her. "It's in the eighth deck hangar like you said, initialised and ready to fire."
She hadn't expected it to be complete, hadn't really expected it to be a viable option.
In the distance the crippled hammerhead crashed down onto the planet's surface. A host of little points of light within her winked out with it. She ruthlessly crushed the wave of grief that followed it.
The controls were simple. She could launch it at the planet and Malachor's gravity would surge instantaneously to such an extreme that its own crust would be sundered and crushed into the core, as would the entirety of Mandalore's fleet. As well as the entirety of her own.
It would save Revan. It would kill more mandalorians than even Alek had.
It would wipe out her own forces.
It might even kill Revan if the strength of it turned out to have been miscalculated. It would be a total victory anyway, crippling the Mandalorian forces definitively enough to end the war.
The chaos seemed to retreat from her and she found herself in a bubble of surreal stillness.
She gripped the control panel hard enough to make her gauntlets creak. She felt the hold of her heavy armour hugging her upper body, the soft texture of her robes against the back of her neck and the weight of her lightsabers pulling down her belt.
She looked back to the zabrak. Bao-dur. He'd been with her for six years, specialising in ground assault weaponry. He'd weathered some of the worst battles under her. He looked so trusting.
It occurred to her, in a surreal and detached way, that she had somehow gone her entire life without having to make a real decision. She'd answered calls, slipped into ready made roles, and followed orders, but in that moment it all felt like it had been someone else's idea. Following a path someone else cleared.
She had no orders for the mass shadow generator. Revan didn't even know it existed, and no one else outranked her.
There was nobody to consult, nobody to direct her or second guess her. There was no path.
There was just a button and her. And time was running out.
The lives of some twelve hundred jedi glowed in her mind's eye around Malachor. Over forty eight thousand republic soldiers. Some sixty thousand mandalorians. She could feel them all, the enemy as connected to her as her allies now. Over a hundred thousand lives, glowing clusters of Force, roaring with the throes of combat. She loved them, would give her life for them without hesitation.
The Force itself hummed around her with foggy agitation, which struck her as odd. She felt perfectly still for the first time in years.
What did she truly believe?
What a curious time it was to realise that she had no idea.
One of her cruisers took out a Mandalorian command ship. She felt the cheers of her blissfully unaware troops.
Could she kill them all to end the war?
On the other side of a moon Revan cut down Mandalore. A frigate rammed his ship a moment later.
Yes. She could.
And she did.
Next Time: Exile
Authors note: yeah I know, KotOR fic in 2021, what am I thinking? In many ways this is the fic I wanted to write when I first played this game eleven years ago. This one goes out to the precocious brat of a teenager I was. Thank you for reading.