Been toying with this on and off for the last four years, it's a relief to get it done!
content advisory: this fic contains canon-typical violence and one torture scene that is both physical and psychological. Please read responsibly.
Destiny has teased Malak for years.
He remembers what Revan said to him on Cathar, minutes after she launched the crusade that would reshape the galaxy. And again, when she returned from Malachor V and ordered him not to kill the lone Jedi who, shattered, managed to crawl away from its apocalypse.
Our moment will come.
At first his hunt is a matter of expedience.
No matter how many larynxes Malak crushes, he can't stop the murmurs. There remain plenty among his officer corps who defile his Fleet with talk of rebellion, or with the corrosive insubordination of doubt that is mutiny's prelude.
They say that he's not the tactician she was. That his savagery at Telos, at Taris, at scores of worlds has cost their empire (their empire, they say) allies, trade routes, legitimacy. That if the Dark Lady should return to lead them, they'll support her rise over their present leader. As if the architect of two wars wouldn't massacre them for siding against her in the first place.
How little they all knew her. Idiots.
As with many questions of expedience, Malak's answer is straightforward and brutal.
He has some concern about the Academy on Korriban, where in cloaked words those rebellious whispers smuggle daggers meant for him. Not because it is unexpected: treachery is the way of the Sith, after all, and Malak would be worried if there weren't plots. Might start to wonder if, somehow, a Jedi had suborned his followers.
Direct confrontation from Korriban poses no threat to him. Wynn is a snake, not a dragon, easily ground into the dust. None of the rest are half as clever or cunning as even that pretentious wretch.
But still he broods, because no one knows better than Darth Malak that even the strongest Sith is vulnerable to a well-timed fusillade of turbolaser fire.
He strangles every hint of insubordination before it can learn to walk. Always it slithers back to hiss with its subversive tongue. Lord Malak has lost his edge. We need her to lead us in the final push. The "Jedi" we keep hearing about is her, undercover, biding her time. It's her. It's her. It's her.
Very well.
If slaughtering this Jedi fugitive is the only way to throttle the ridiculous notion that Malak could never best the brilliant, the charismatic, the all-powerful Dark Lady of the Sith…
Three levels above the Leviathan's secondary hangar, the Force delivers him his chance.
Our moment will come. Once again, the Force has upheld Revan's verdict.
Carth Onasi raises his heavy blaster to a firing position. One of the Republic's best agents and a constant thorn in the sole of Malak's boot, he is the picture of a steady soldier. Reliable, even to the end, and steady with devotion to his Jedi leader — a loyalty whose shine blushes too rich to be mere dedication to the cause. Below all of that lies an empty pit, that deadness of grief that remains when the fire of vengeance has burned itself out.
Defiant, but pitiful. What a pleasure it will be to bring Onasi to Telos, so that he might walk once again on its scoured surface and die choking on its ashes.
Perhaps he'll order the man's own son to perform the execution. Wouldn't that be poetic?
Bastila Shan, tense as a white-knuckled fist, lifts her saber into a Djem So ready. Given her reputation, Malak is surprised to feel nothing like a Jedi's nauseating grace. Emotion storms through her, a roaring mix of anger and fear and guilt and shame. He recognizes this tempest. Though it is a thin and untrained imitation of his own full-bodied wrath, it's a familiar echo of the turmoil led him to take up the mantle of Darth alongside his dearest friend. Of his terrible realization, later, that Revan's shadow was too long, that standing in it left him alone with his darkness.
He wonders idly whether this is what's happened to Shan, or if she has always been a malfunctioning fission reactor, ticking wildly toward her inevitable combustion.
It ends here, Malak, she snarls, duranium eyes ablaze. The light side of the Force always triumphs.
Surprise shakes Malak with laughter. What light? Shan is so afraid of the woman she holds on a leash that she doesn't even realize she's well past the end of her own. And she's strong, stronger than the upstart Bandon ever was.
In another life, she'd be an opportunity. But Bastila Shan is not his destiny. Through the lens of the dark side, she is a million electrical wires, their insulation frayed to microns, all tied into one furiously sparking knot three feet to her left.
A knot that the Force reflects in glass.
Since Taris he's waited for her. Months of bounty hunters and hapless lackeys and dead apprentices. He's put his entire galactic conquest on hold to pursue this one small ship of fugitives. Dantooine lies in smoking ruins, the Enclave annihilated, and the bombardment brought Malak no peace because he could not find her.
And here she is.
He has wondered, and feared, and hungered. Her Mandalorian mask has haunted his thoughts. Her veiled smirk has tortured his dreams.
And now, wearing the bland robes of a Jedi, a blue saber's glow casting the pale lines of her face in ice, her shimmer in the Force like moonlight on pondwater —
finally, his former master-companion-friend stands before him, and she's —
she's —
What a fool he's been.
Bastila Shan has nothing to worry about. It's not her.
It's close. Painfully so.
How many times did Revan joke about being larger than life? This woman exudes the same presence now despite her tiny frame. Midnight-shadow hair spilling around her narrow face in an unkempt mess, acid in her stare. The almost-gentle fold of her fingers around her lightsaber, the way its cerulean light bends off her pale skin - the familiarity punches at Malak's lungs. Even the Force believes it's her. It pours sensations into her aura: the fuel-ignition roar of freighter engines, the plasma-simmer of melted chains, the first lungful of air after a lifetime of drowning.
But Malak has watched Revan all his life. He's celebrated with her in victory and raged with her in defeat. He knows her thoughts better than any other in the galaxy, better than he knows his own. He's dueled her and lived. This is just a Jedi wearing Darth Revan's face.
The last emotion he expects to feel is grief, but he cannot deny it. He killed Revan long ago. His destiny, all that he's built toward in the last year, is to break her corpse.
Because of course he can't even escape her ghost.
His snarl is mechanical, guttural. The snap-hiss of scarlet rage sears all else to cinders.
Pride has been the downfall of nearly every Dark Lord in history. Ludo Kressh, fooled by a string of victories into believing that his cornered foe had no punches left to throw. Naga Sadow, accumulating enemies until even he could not withstand a universe arrayed against him. Exar Kun and his overreach at Ossus, the raid that resulted in Qel-Droma's capture and the subsequent Jedi assault on Yavin.
Darth Revan, exultant in her possession of the Star Forge and reveling in the Republic's impending domino collapse, believing she had nothing to fear from the man whose face she'd sheared in half.
Yes, Malak has learned well the lessons of his predecessors. He knows what fruits pride can bear.
But that fruit can also be sustenance. Right now it fires the furnace of Malak's wrath, burns the lethargy from his limbs and ignites the material of his fears into anger that he can use. One cannot be the Dark Lord, Master of the Sith, and ruler of the known galaxy unless he knows in his core that the universe meant for him and only him to reign supreme.
Pride simply reinforces the foundation which knowledge provides. So Revan told him once, back when they still called themselves Jedi and she sought to justify the dark path she'd sent them careening along.
The Jedi now staring him down has no such foundation. No knowledge upon which to build even a feeble attempt at supremacy. Whatever fragments she can remember, if she remembers, will do nothing for her. This woman is not Revan.
Victory surging in his veins, Malak tells her she is anyway.
It doesn't elicit the reaction he expects. A fractional widening of the eyes, a treble-blink in her heartbeat. The Force shudders once around her, then returns to its mirror stillness. She takes his revelation in such stride that Malak might as well have told her the measurements of the bulkhead.
It's enough to make him doubt his instinct. Make him wonder.
But only for a moment. Her non-reaction itself is confirmation that Revan is lost forever: the strategist he knew would have considered that how she received such a statement would have an effect on those fighting beside her.
Ironic, really.
Poor Onasi flinches, lost in the vindication of his deepest paranoia, and for a heartbeat his attention splits. Malak takes the opportunity to throw him twenty meters into unconsciousness.
Shan's threadbare control snaps. Solar flares roll from her, all Jedi restraint abandoned in her panic. She nearly tumbles headlong into the dark right then and there, and for a moment Malak has cause to worry what he might have just unleashed.
But some scrap, some desperate fragment of her training holds her barriers together just long enough for the Dark Lord to gather the universe into his lungs and blast her into unconsciousness with withering currents of lightning.
Then it's just the two of them, as it was always meant to be.
As close as could be, at least.
Malak's killing blow halts in its descent.
There's red fear in her durasteel-blue eyes: his own blade, reflected. Feather-light in his two-handed grip. Shouldn't destiny have weight?
Except that it does. He can feel it, but not in his hands. It's behind and above him, a sword the width of a comet trail hurtling toward the back of his neck.
She's rising to a knee from the deck at his feet.
The hammer of his pulse falls once in his ears.
It's a trap. It must be. She deceived the Mandalorians. Lured them onto the field time and again to crush them. The Republic too, Jedi after Jedi baited into failure. It's how she took his jaw. It's why he had the Leviathan twist her flagship into curls of space debris: he knew the dangers of challenging her on her turf.
In the thick cloud of doubt that billows up from his gut, he suffocates.
Around them the Force holds its breath. Dark and light alike, frozen in an executioner's tableau.
If he was wrong, and it's her, and her fear is bait —
— but if it's not her, and her fear is true, and he's about to destroy her —
Dread of a different sort locks his legs in place, closes around his hands on his lightsaber. Just as he was Revan's confidant, so she was his. The one privy to his quietest moments. Not just victories and losses, but all that lay between. All his conflicts, decisions, the steps that brought him to this place exists only in her memory. The man who would become Darth Malak was unformed, incomplete; the Dark Lord is ready to end that man forever —
Am I?
for three years he's dreamed this moment, and finally it's arrived —
Has it? Have I?
it's here, and he —
Who?
he —
hesitates.
Half a heartbeat lasts forever.
The Force exhales.
Into his hestitation flies a flurry of yellow flame, a desperate double-bladed fire that is rage and anguish and despair all at once. A young woman's cry — Revan, go! — shoves Malak's destiny away from him, the blast doors slamming shut.
By the time Malak regains himself, the woman with Revan's face —
It wasn't her.
— is gone.
Still alive.
Leaving him alone with Shan.
His Force-infused punch hits the Jedi princess so hard that the shockwave dents the bulkhead behind her. Her precious little head jerks back, blood spraying as she crumples to the deck. A puppet with her strings cut.
He hopes that not-Revan can feel that blow too.
The deprivation chamber's climate is carefully controlled to maximize the subject's discomfort. Lighting and temperature shift along irregular timetables and patterns, while the vibration-proofed bulkhead keeps sound from even the most sensitive hearing. A modified recycling system adds a metallic tang to already-acrid air. From the inside there are no obvious doors or windows. Just a box. A universe small enough to suffocate in.
It's useful for interrogation, but Malak is not here to question its sole occupant. He comes, instead, with answers.
Bastila Shan, strapped to the table in the center of the room, glares at him. The iron glint in her eyes is brittle and feverish, a consequence of two days without sleep or water. She clings to the Force with the desperation of the mariner in a drifting and ruined vessel, scrambling for every gasp of oxygen. In another sixty or seventy hours, that death grip will be the only thing keeping her alive.
Malak would smile if he still had the apparatus to do so. Already the Shan girl is learning how to be Sith. 'The Force shall free me', indeed.
This torture is simple and straightforward: unlike the Sith claimants who slink around on Korriban, Malak has no interest in convoluted pathways to pain. The most effective way to defeat the light is not to overwhelm it, but to snuff it out. Denial is far better for crushing a Jedi's spirit than any extravagant agonies.
It's too similar to the lives they choose, Revan told him once. Jedi walk such a narrow line in search of balance, and most of them balk long before they attain it. They already deny themselves so much. Strip away their choice and they can't take it. They break, or they die.
They choose the light; Malak takes that choice away. They force themselves to reject the darkness, so he leaves them with nothing else. Make them yearn; make them want. All the power of the Force is trivial in comparison to the most primal sentient need for something, anything.
Pain, after such denial, is motivation. Motivation to attain, to gain, to own themselves. To master others. To always be able to satisfy that innate desire, no matter the cost.
An unwavering Jedi can take weeks to shatter; the truest among them die long before succumbing. Already Malak has written off most of those captured at Dantooine. The weak broke too quickly and the strong will take time Malak has no wish to spend. Not when he can deploy them as the Force equivalent of fuel cells.
Bastila Shan, however, was wavering even in the space over Taris.
She snarls at him, the Force billowing around her in impotent threat, and Malak wants to laugh. "No matter what you do, you will not turn me," she spits at him, her voice a creaking and dusty thing. "I am a Jedi, and I will never abandon the light."
Malak basks in the lie born of her despair, in the pleasant summer evening's warmth of her hatred. The Force around her is darker than black, roiling with anguish and guilt, and Malak hasn't even gotten started. She's not even holding back anymore. She just hasn't admitted it to herself yet.
If he didn't know better, he'd say she lost herself in the dark some time ago. Hardly a surprise. Between the burdens she must carry as the Order's "Last Hope", not-Revan's obvious refusal to be leashed, and the young woman's own self-loathing — and is that actually desire he senses, a fiery craving for her charge, kindled in the crevasses of her most deeply buried hopes and doused in shame? — Malak's job is practically done for him. All he has to do now is put up a mirror.
How convenient. Revan aids him even from her grave.
Your agony was mine, he growls as she twists against her bindings. False vulnerability, these words, but not for lack of being true. How closely this girl walks the same path he once did. I know your frustration, your helplessness. What is left when devotion turns hollow and empty.
The process by which one's champion becomes a nemesis. The lesson Malak learned more keenly than all the others.
He sees despair behind her eyes. Good.
Time to work a different set of lessons.
With sharp words through the Force, Malak digs his gloved fingers into the stress fractures of Shan's psyche. He does not possess his old companion's artistry, but she's barely holding together as it is. A scratch here, a prod there, every suffused with his clawed hate for the girl who let not-Revan away…
Then he pulls.
Lightning dances off the chamber walls, and Bastila Shan's suffering shrieks across the stars.
Half a galaxy away, the girl's awakening finds its echo, and then -
Silence.
It hangs still, charged, the air just before a thunderclap.
An emergency package from Korriban.
Saul Karath's replacement reads the report as if it's his own eulogy, but Malak is too distracted to bother killing the man. Even on the opposite side of populated space he can hear the cries, smell the blood. Entire battalions of Sith — the basest inductees, sadistic apprentices, the most devious of the ones who laughably call themselves masters — vanish in the space of a few hours, consumed to a one in a ravenous inferno.
An inferno that comprises a single nuclear flame.
Malak knew that someday, when the Star Forge had churned out enough droids to crew the Fleet, he would need to cleanse the Academy of any who could one day threaten him. To have his job done for him brings satisfaction and envy in equal measure. Weak as Korriban's Sith were, such a massacre should not have been possible for any lesser being. Only a true Dark Lord of the Sith has such power.
Only a Dark Lord. Present, or former.
Perhaps it is time to reopen the question of Revan's survival. The thought fuels his rage, but he is not so proud that he cannot entertain the notion. Besides, he knows now that he can defeat her.
His jaw aches with phantom pain. This time will be different.
A flash of prescience prompts Malak to send his new apprentice to Lehon's surface. Any delay in Revan's arrival will serve Malak well, allow him to steep for longer in the null energies of the Star Forge. He has dozens of captives from Dantooine: Jedi sages seized from the surface, Knights captured during a pathetic attempt to storm the Leviathan. Time is on his side, not Rev— not the Republic's.
Whatever the outcome on Lehon, he loses nothing. Shan will die atop the Rakatan temple, sparing Malak the need to do battle with his most formidable acolyte. One less pawn to deal with. Revan will come to face him having shattered her own heart, bearing in her soul the fresh wound of a bond betrayed.
Or Shan will flee the fight, defeated, and seek a place stronger in the dark side to nurse her wounded ego. She'll lure her former charge beyond the station's event horizon and force a confrontation there in darkness's ravenous heart.
Malak doesn't believe for a moment that a third future is possible, that Shan could possibly succeed.
He will face Revan again.
The scene is one for holodrama.
He towers above their battlefield, cloaked in the majesty of the Sith, armorweave and dark energy blending into smoke and wings. Around him, the ancient Rakatan station overflows with death — from the two fleets outside, from the fallen Jedi within, from the civil war on the planet below. Even Lehon's sun shivers, cold before its time, its light sapped and drained.
In the center of the chamber Revan stands unmasked in black and russet robes. Gone from the Force is her gleaming veneer, that pool of Jedi stillness that hid her emotions when they met in the bowels of the Leviathan. In its place is the core of a star, scream-white and incandescent with fury. A violet lightsaber hums in her dominant left hand, its warsong eclipsing all the Star Forge's dark orchestra. From her right sprouts a crimson bar, a prize from Korriban as full of wrath as Malak's own.
Laughter breaks from Malak's cybernetic throat. If this isn't Revan, back from the dead, then he never knew her at all.
Opening feints weren't her style — few opponents were ever strong enough for Revan to bother with a less-than-direct approach — but when he blocks her initial flurry she'll sink into the predatory intelligence that made her such a legendary duelist. She'll lean on her primary for heavy strikes, outside swings that seek to draw his awareness away from her offhand. His raw power will batter her plan to pieces and she'll pivot into acrobatics and fluidity, closing the disparity created by the difference in their statures, until he applies his frustration to his own speed and once again forces Revan to adapt —
A shiver runs down his spine a how right it feels to be taking her measure.
Do you remember, now, what you were? he sneers. His breath sounds harsh and heavy in his ears.
Unperturbed she returns his stare. Her expression is the same one he always felt behind the Revanchist's mask. Foreboding chills the skin of Malak's palms.
I know who I am, Revan replies. The sort of answer that destiny gives.
They collide.
His lightsaber crashes into hers with all the might of the dark side behind it. Revan stumbles back, the difference in their physical strength too great, and Malak lunges into the gap with vengeance. For one resounding moment that roars louder than the Star Forge's consumption of Lehon's star, Malak is victorious.
Then Revan plants her feet, stopping their movement dead. She tilts her head up, looks at him across their bladelock with red and purple glowing in her eyes.
And smirks.
Oh.
A spastic mynock, more leaping and fluttering robes than crackling blades. A gundark defending its nest with scales and claws. A great krayt dragon spitting acid and charging with enough force to crush starships. Slyness, momentum, ferocity. She is all of these and more, sliding from one to another between steps and strikes and sweeps as she crushes in her fist everything Malak thought he knew of lightsaber dueling.
She slips within his longer reach, eludes his heavier blows. He aggresses, and he cannot find her. He pauses to recover, and suddenly her two blades assail him as twelve. He bulls open an opening and steps on a plasma grenade. Haphazard blaster bolts seek him out and ping off his armor in ominous accelerando.
Malak infuses himself with the life forces of twenty captive Jedi, batteries at his beck and call. Every time he reaches into those wells, he is not just pulling the energy from their presence in the Force. The very act of siphoning itself empowers the darkness with resonating horror and leaves behind piles of dust. He wrings every last gasp of life from them,
and she lets him do it,
and still she's the stronger.
Every one of the deaths in the battle outside, tens of thousands lost to fire and decompression and twisting durasteel, echoes as a continuous wail that rakes at even Malak's psyche. Revan moves through it like electricity in water, and Malak laughs wildly at it all. The prosthesis she gave him — it's her, it's always been her — turns his humor into a caustic hack.
No less now than lifetimes ago at the Temple on Coruscant, he's drawn to her. Not by love but by gravity. Revan and Malak is an astrometric binary, and he has always been the one who lived in her shadow.
In her every movement is the power he's pursued and could never attain because it was never just power. She made her power what it was, not the other way around.
Every strike, lunge, parry, counter tilts the ground of their duel further toward her until he is climbing a mountain, his lightsaber flailing against an uncaring sky.
She needed him too, once. He has to believe that.
Chunks of his armor clatter on the deck. Orange agony flares into cauteries from the slashes he fails to block. His cloak, cut clean by a swing meant for his neck, billowing to the ground. His left hand, separated from numbed wrist. Even the dark side itself shrinks around him, closing him in, falling from him in pieces until he's surrounded by her will and nothing else.
She is everything to him. Friend and companion, apprentice and lieutenant, hated rival.
Perhaps he was her friend. Before he became an asset, then an obstacle, an enemy.
Soon, nothing at all.
On his knees before her. A sick, mocking echo of oaths long since burned on ambition's altar.
Metal clacks against metal as she presses her lightsaber emitter to his jaw. The crystal contained within batters his senses with power as it sings of Cathar and Serroco and Taris, and Dxun, and Malachor V, and of the destruction of the Star Forge so near in the future that the Force already encompasses the sentient station's childlike fear.
Her violet blade will kill him. The saber that is truly her, and not-her, and more-than-her. The weapon whose crystal core projects the true soul of the companion who left him behind.
If there is poetry in this, Malak is too overwhelmed by his wounds to see it, and too near the end to try.
Her attention is a knife, sharp as frost against his neck. "You know that it didn't have to be this way, Darth."
Not even his name. Just Darth to her. "Of course it did, Revan," he wheezes. His wounds make speaking difficult, but he manages. It's still easier than speaking with no jaw. "Ever since you led me to war and beyond. Into the dark, and then past it to something else."
Revan stares at him for a long moment before shrugging away a past that she does not remember. Or she does remember, and she simply does not care. Malak does not know which cuts deeper. "Last words?"
Many. More than he has breaths remaining to say.
But he hopes she will try to know him, to understand. Revan was the only one who ever did. The woman now before him is the only one who ever will.
Do you think, he wonders aloud, that you've wiped your slate clean? That because you've fallen back to the light that you've erased your shadow, that you've undone all you accomplished in the dark? The Order, the Republic…they'll forgive you in the way the weak always do. Because they must. They'll forgive, but they won't forget.
And why should you care? What need have you for redemption, you who have always been the hero and villain of your story? The rest of us are nothing.
You are alone.
And beneath that final curse, susurrous, you didn't have to be.
Violet light carves the hollows of Revan's cheeks, gleams on the pitch-colored roots of her hair. There's no movement on her ghastly face. No malice, no judgment that Malak can sense. No sign that he's affected her at all.
Still, she listens to his every word. Exactly as the Revan he once knew would have.
No, it's not enough. Not even close. But nothing ever could be. She is alone, and so is h—
Snap-hiss.
Ton of fun to play with a villain's perspective!
A major goal of mine was to highlight the ways Malak & Revan mirror Bastila & Revan. It is no accident that the longest segment of this study is Malak's dissection of Bastila's psyche.
comments and critique are always appreciated!