It's like being blind, she decided.
Katrina had long been searching for some way to describe not knowing who you were, not having any memories that didn't belong to someone else.
Sitting in the cockpit, staring blankly out at the morning sunrise of Anelli, she had finally decided that blindness was an acceptable synonym. Blindness meant that, despite the fact that you knew the definition of the word mother, you would never know what one looked like or how to identify your own.
Her latest vision was unnerving. It wasn't images of Star Maps and masked, anonymous Sith activating them. It wasn't elaborations on past visions, on people she already knew.
Instead it was a vision complete with feelings, with the pain, anger, and disappointment the younger Revan had suffered, and love for people she didn't know existed.
Feeling sadness over the death of a mother you didn't remember almost equaled the awkwardness of an embrace from a stranger saying he was your brother.
"You must have enjoyed these sunrises when you lived here." She glanced behind her. Bastila entered the cockpit, her hair only slightly askew from sleeping but otherwise standing calm and regal.
Katrina turned back towards the sky, folding her arms in front of her uncomfortably. Bastila seated herself silently in the co-pilot's seat.
"I assume by your silence that you're still denying you ever lived here?" Katrina looked sideways at her, saying nothing.
Bastila snorted, folding her arms in much the same fashion as Katrina herself.
"The Council certainly knew what they were doing when they put us together, didn't they?"
"With you never talking and me not saying anything? Definitely." Another moment of silence passed, no less awkward than the first.
"I've been having...I suppose I wouldn't call them visions," The Jedi finally began. "They're mostly incomplete, and they mostly concern you."
Both glanced at each other. Katrina remembered the first time she and Bastila had discussed their bond, how Bastila had said that she certainly didn't like the idea of being tied to her so intimately.
She also remembered her own wry reply that she wasn't sure she wanted Bastila in her dreams either. It had always been slightly uncomfortable, slightly embarrassing, as if each had seen the other physically naked as well as emotionally.
"I know you have had the same visions, if not more in depth." She nodded. Bastila furrowed her brow.
"The first was of Malak,"the Jediadded. Katrina only nodded again. She could see Bastila's increasing frustration.
"He seemed to be counseling you against seeking out the Star Forge."
"For as much good as it did him. Or me." She leaned forward, resting her hands on either side of the chair.
She was a decent pilot, but without the use of the Force, she was nothing spectacular. Yet lately she always seemed to find herself in the pilot's seat, curling up into it as if it somehow contained a trace of the man who used to occupy it.
"And last night's vision was of Revan's... of my mother," Katrina finally said, trying to gauge Bastila's reaction to the word.
The Jedi's face seemed frozen in an expression of feigned disinterest.
"She was dying," Bastila replied.
Katrina saw the tightness of her face, and she could swear she could almost see the Jedi's lips mouthing every word of the Code, reciting it over and over again.
"Bastila, I'm sorry," she said. The Jedi sighed.
"Please, don't concern yourself. I sometimes forget with my own struggles how hard yours must be in comparison. It was a moment of weakness for you, and I should not have been so insistent in that moment. My mother-"the Jedisighed again.
"My mother and I were on very good terms when she passed, and the thought gives me peace."
"You are a servant of the light. I find that I often struggle against the dark side, but you make it look so easy. Is it truly not a struggle for you as well?"
She blushed, taking guilty pleasure in the compliment from her quasi-mentor.
"I just do what I feel is right."
Katrina smiled bitterly. What a fool I was.
"Why do you suppose these visions are coming to us now?" Katrina shrugged. It could be any number of reasons: The planet itself, being her homeworld, may have triggered them, or maybe the Force was acting through them for as of yet unknown reasons, or her memories were maybe finally starting to return to her.
Or, she thought, sitting up in her chair. My connection with Phineas may be bringing them back too.
He had been the only slightly familiar thing in the vision, the only element that she could use to connect Revan's memories with her own to know that the vision had actually happened.
She thought of his stance in the vision: proud, with his head held high and his hands behind his back. She thought of his stance when she had first met him. She rose from the chair.
"I'll be back by the afternoon. We'll try our luck with the next suspect then."
"Where are you going?" Bastila called after her.
"To talk to my brother." The phrase slid out easily, as if she had been saying it her entire life. She chose not to turn around and see the slightly relieved smile she knew was on the Jedi's face.
The streets were already busy with the early-rising Anellians. A slight breeze blew against her as she walked. She tried to remember walking these streets before.
When I walked them before, I doubt I appreciated them anyways, she thought, feeling the younger Revan's impatience to leave the planet all over again.
After making some inquiries, she found that all roads in Fornia seemed to lead back to the government offices. Apparently politics was such an important value here that the politicians themselves lived in apartments connected to their place of work.
The woman dealing with the usual crowds paid her no notice as she entered the building. She smirked, already liking the perks of a brother in power.
Katrina wandered the clean halls of the offices, getting murderous stares from groups waiting for meetings with the Committee and a few curious glances at her lightsaber dangling from her belt.
Phineas' apartments were located down long winding hallways reaching far back into the mountains that were connected to the offices. Two large black doors stood, waiting for her.
She hesitated a moment, surprised at how this was only one of very few doors she was actually going to enter invited, without having to use her security skills or her lightsaber to bash her way through it. Being welcome seemed foreign to her.
She finally reached a hand up and knocked twice.
Phineas opened the door instantly, almost as if he had been standing behind it waiting for visitors.
"Revan," he said, with a relieved smile. "I thought you were the leader of the Anellian Environmental Agency. We've been ignoring his case and I was beginning to fear a personal visit." She raised an eyebrow.
"Does that happen often?" He smirked.
"Often enough." He reached an arm out from behind his back, motioning for her to come inside.
Her brother's home was primarily form and function; everything was clean, sleek, bland, and uninteresting. She wondered if he used it for sleep and little else.
She turned to look at him; impeccably dressed in long robes of gray like the rest of the Committee, hazel eyes watching her expectantly.
"Is there something I can do for you?" She didn't answer for a moment, wandering around and picking up various belongings.
"How did you fare with tracking down the perpetrator of the attack?"
"We paid Faris a visit-"
"So I heard," he finished grimly. She glanced up at him.
Phineas' gaze was unforgiving, but neither was it condemning. She wondered how he felt, having a Sith Lord for a sister, a perpetrator of innumerable crimes herself.
"His droids attacked us." She could hear herself getting defensive already, and she hadn't even gotten to Faris' suicide yet. "And we had to fight our way in. When we found him, he thought we were Sith." Her brother nodded.
"Logical. The last time he saw you, you were a Sith." She looked up, still holding the paperweight she had been tossing in her hand.
"So it was Malak and Revan who went to retrieve the droids he had promised?"
"Yes. You did many things personally in those days. I guess you thought no one else could do them better."
"Why didn't anyone stop him from supplying the droids in the first place?" Phineas sighed heavily.
"Here on Anelli, we have no laws condemning traitors- only those who break the law. We can't tell a man what to do with his own property. If he believed in the Sith cause and wanted to help them, that was his business. He broke no law by doing so."
"He didn't believe in it," Katrina answered. "He made the agreement solely to protect himself if the Sith did win the war. But he got a taste of what Sith business transactions are really like."
"What happened?"
"He had a daughter, Sonia-" Phineas shook his head, frowning.
"I remember her. She was beginning to have a promising career in the lower circles of government."
"Did she ever mention anything about the Sith?" He furrowed his brow.
"What does his daughter have to do with this? Did he perpetrate the attack because of her?"
Impatience and a longing for concise summaries was apparently a trait she shared with her brother.
"He wanted revenge on the man who recruited his daughter into the Sith, and that's why the droids turned against me and Malak." She heard herself say 'me' and realized that she had called herself Revan.
She watched Phineas try to contain a smile, and decided she would deal with it later.
"He went mad in his mourning for his daughter and his fear of the Sith. When we tried to reason with him, he activated a suicide program and killed himself with his own droids." Her voice became hard. She put the paperweight back on the table she had lifted it from with much more force than she had intended.
"And no, he wasn't the perpetrator."
She felt angry, and she was ashamed that she was angry, and she was still angrier that she was ashamed.
"You're frustrated," Phineas murmured. She could feel his sympathy, but she could also feel his superiority, how he was secretly congratulating himself. Whether it was because he had not fallen to the dark side as she had, or her inability to find the attacker she didn't know.
If I had lived my life alone on Anelli, after my mother died and my sister and friend left me to become powerful Jedi and feared Sith Lords, I might take whatever victories I could find too.
She leaned up against a table near the wall, nodding.
"I'm sorry. Perhaps I should have looked further into it-" Katrina waved her hand, absolving him, despite the fact that she was fighting to keep her anger away from him, from blaming him for the fact that Faris was not the one who had attacked her, that she hadn't been able to impale him with her lightsaber and go home.
Technically, I am home. Conflicting feelings rose up and battled each other within the expanse of her chest. The Force told her Anelli was her home, or had been at one time. Her heart told her that home was parsecs and parsecs away, on Telos, with Carth.
"I sense you mourn for someone," Phineas said, somewhat tentatively. She looked up, his perception catching her off guard.
She was only used to fellow Jedi knowing what she was thinking. A brother's intuition was something new.
"I don't mourn. He's not dead." Phineas smirked.
"Oh, it's that kind of someone." She somehow found the good grace not to blush. Her brother's politician pose softened for a moment, and he folded his arms in front of him, leaning against his door.
"I'm thinking it's too late for me to give older brother's approval, and I'm betting you wouldn't care if you had it or not in the first place." Katrina smiled.
Whether she remembered him or not, he definitely remembered her correctly.
"He wouldn't happen to be the Republic officer you mentioned having been injured in the attack with you, would he?" She nodded.
She could feel regret and guilt from him, and she instantly pitied him. She knew how those particular emotions ate away at you until you could blame yourself for all the wrongs of the universe.
Never mind the fact that that's actually true for me and all the wrongs of the past few years.
"I have to admit I'm a little surprised."
"Why?"
"You never seemed interested in romance, Revan. If Malak had known that, it probably would have changed things." Katrina narrowed her eyes. 'Malak' and 'romance' in the same sentence was enough to make anyone do a double take.
"What are you talking about?" Phineas pushed himself back up to his normal straight posture.
"Malak wasn't only your closest friend, Revan. He was pathetically in love with you. It was one of the reasons he followed you around everywhere, obeying your every whim. But since you never showed any interest in that type of thing, he abandoned the idea."
Malak being in love with her. Malak wanting her to return that love. Malak wanting to do the same things she did with Carth-
She shuddered. Those were definitely things she would think about later.
The thought of Malak, of her past, reminded her of the reason she had come here in the first place.
"I'm not keeping you from anything, am I?" Phineas shook his head.
"I've been having these...visions." Katrina began, tracing the lines in her palm. "I'm not sure if they're my memories coming back, or if coming here and meeting you is triggering them." He smiled faintly.
"I may not have become a Jedi, but I understand the Force. I've been thinking a lot about the days before you left too."
"I saw our mother." She watched his slightly whimsical face turn into a frown. "I saw her dying."
"Not the memory I would have chosen."
Today was supposed to be a day of joy, a day of pride. Today was the day that she would tell them of her intentions to join the Jedi, to get off of this red industrial cloud amid their praise and applause.
"I was so angry." She could hear herself referring to Revan as Katrina, Katrina as Revan, both of them being who she was. "Even then, apparently, I was always angry."
"You had every right to be, Revan," Phineas interrupted. "You wanted Mother's pride, and she couldn't give it to you."
"You were angry too," she answered evenly, glancing up at him.
"Yes, I was," he replied calmly. "You were leaving me, Malak was leaving, Mother was dying. I wanted her pride too. I wanted yours above all, but you would be gone." Her brother sighed.
"I'd like to think I'm over such feelings now."
The tears unsettled her, and she stood, stiff and uncomfortable. She didn't know how to respond to this- to this dying woman who wept and admitted pain when she had lived her life with a mother who had had no time for bedtime kisses and taught her children that strength, resilience, and defending what you believed in were the most important values.
"What was she like?" Phineas shifted his feet as though uncomfortable with the question.
"You must have felt how hard it was for us to see her like that. She was never weak. She was like you. She worked her entire life without complaining, despite the fact that she was a single mother trying to support both of us."
"Where was our father?" Her brother's face tightened.
"He died." The anger flowed through him freely, so overwhelming for a moment that Katrina almost needed to catch her breath.
"How?"
"When I was about five, he got it in his head that he would leave for a cause he believed in, some battle somewhere against someone; I never did find out. He left all of us with his bravado and his arrogance and got himself killed."
Dustil would like him, she thought to herself.
"Anyways," he finally continued, straightening up. "You never met him. You were only a baby."
She wracked her brain for the memory of a father, of some type of strong male figure to look up to. She found none, only a slightly lingering memory of Malak at the door of her mother's sickroom.
"If you don't mind, can you save any other memories you might have until later?" Her brother's voice was strained.
She had awakened something that had probably been lying dormant in his mind for years, a blinding rage that she could feel through the Force, courting Phineas to give into it.
Katrina was silent, looking away politely as if his anger was some kind of hideous birth defect she didn't want to stare at.
"What do you intend on doing now?" he finally said. She turned back to him, taking in his average face, countered with a kind of self-assured glow that said there was nothing average about him.
"We'll probably head to Ruhol next. He'll be the easiest to find and maybe more cooperative." Phineas nodded.
"Be careful around him. He's a little sneaky and good with words." She smirked, gripping the hilt of her lightsaber.
"I don't think he'll be a problem." Her brother shook his head ruefully, smiling back at her. He moved to hold the door open for her exit.
"Thank you, Phineas." His name seemed to become easier to say with every passing day.
Phineas reached out a hand to her. He gripped her arm, and she felt instantly how right a feeling of camaraderie was with him, how this man being her brother seemed to be part of the natural order of the universe.
It was comforting to know that she had a place, that she wasn't the cardboard cut-out the Council had created. She gripped his arm back.
"You're welcome, Revan."