The Color of the Force

By: Sapadu

Hiya! Sorry I haven't updated in a while!

Sometimes humans really don't know as much as they think they do. Sometimes, animals really are better companions than people. I'm not saying people are horrible, it's just... well... only a select few I have found to be good companions.

Yes... your mother was one of them... you read me like a book, don't you?

But when I met her in person... it was a very, very... strange circumstance. She'd been assigned as a nurse already, so she'd long been at that post. I had gotten injured from an accident in one of the mining tunnels and Kendalina had to take care of me. I woke up and a pair of bright, gray eyes were staring right at me... I had pretty much the same reaction as you had when you woke up to find Zeebo on your chest...

She gave the Imperials hell. Really, she did.

They never knew such trouble as what she gave them. There was this one incident when she managed to find some music and downloaded it onto the main computer system and programmed the intercom to play the music over and over and over again until the Imperials went insane.

And one time, this one Grand Moff made a pass at her, and she decided to... 'give the cook a break' for the day and made the high ranking officers her infamous curry. Then, there was also the "Spiders-in-the-ice-incident".

She just didn't take garbage from ANYBODY! Trioculous was quite taken with her... in a much more dirty sense than I was... and when he came in for his yearly physical, she put everything into ice, including her hands, so he had to deal with a cold stethoscope, cold hands... it was a nightmare for him.

Before Kendalina came, we as prisoners had horrible conditions. All of us had to sleep in one, cramped room. Only if one of us got sick were we moved. The walls had holes through which all sorts of nasty little critters from outside would crawl in through and when it wasn't animals, it was cold wind. The ventilation system was so poor that half the time we were breathing in dust and dirt and there were young boys, sometimes as young as eight, and those boys would get terribly, terribly sick after breathing in the air. Our water had sludge in it and the cups had been used once for separating mud and mold from the good, clean rock that held spice. Our food was more often than not the slop from the bottom of the pots that was burned and soggy and somebody had decided to mix in curdled milk and bake it and there would be maggots and insect's eggs in it. You were lucky if you could swallow it and throw up later. Most of us couldn't even get it past our teeth. We didn't have showers, so the water we used to clean our hands when we mined spice- the Imperials wanted their spice clean- was the water that the cook would use to mix our food in, or from the hospital wing where the medics dumped all the peroxides or extra blood from surgery or anything like that... or sometimes it would come from the medic center, we'd wash our hands, and then the cook would put it in our food.

What? Oh... I didn't mean to make you sick...

Anyway...

Your mother came and she wouldn't put up with it. When she found out where the water from her surgeries and so forth was going, she got back at the Imperials by cutting open her fingers with a knife, deliberately, over their food and leaving a note that said it had a prisoner's blood in it, or washing the floors and chairs and tabletops with water from the toilet bowls. And when Trioculous got angry at her for it, she outright slapped him across the face.

By all rights, she should have gotten killed for that... but... well... I kind of stole the key to the shed where the stormtroopers kept their blasters and I buried it in one of the older tunnels that were closed off because they would collapse if anyone tried to get another spice out of the rocks.

Then, through some miracle or another, she managed to convince the Imperials that the slaves should have their own showers. Later on, she regretted it... Trioculous managed to corner her while she was washing... but that's another story...

She woke all of us up in the middle of the night and dragged us all outside, turned on the hoses and cleaned all the prisoners with a quick spray.

The next morning, there was an announcement that there were plans for a prisoner's shower and in two weeks, there would be a mandatory policy in which the prisoners must shower once a month.

Needless to say, everyone was pretty shocked.

So... It was incredible what she did for everyone. And I'm pretty sure the Imperials thought she was just gaining support so she could manipulate the prisoners. The strange thing was... she would be rather irritated whenever someone even tried to hold a door for her if she had her arms full... How did she put it?

Oh, yes! And I quote, 'I can take care of myself, dammit.' THAT was it...

As years passed, she started to act... different around me. At first, I was a little worried, but when the day came that she explained that when people fall in love, they sometimes can be shy, it made me feel better.

Your mother was the one to admit it first.

Of course, I really had no idea WHAT my feelings were, except I would gladly dismember anyone who dared to harm a single hair on her head and she meant everything to me... That was all I knew.

Then, one day, I saw her, and... she was BEAUTIFUL... I just see Kendalina... I smelt her... I heard her... I felt her... My body shook. I wanted to jump at her and pull her close... so close we became one person, because I would DIE if she disappeared or we separated.

That's one of the things that hits a sore spot for me: when people undermine things like my feelings for Kendalina, or hers for me, as 'just a little crush'. It makes me feel sick. And it makes me feel insulted.

A crush is something small. You can get over it. You could find out that the person you care for doesn't love you and forget about your feelings for them in a week with an other crush.

Love... love is an all encompassing, wild, blazing, throbbing ache in your chest. You can't get through the day without seeing that person. You depend on the sight of their face to live. Being in love is almost like a drug, except it doesn't make your lungs decay or your brain wither up and dry or any of the gruesome physical affects of drugs: when you're in love, you forget all your problems, the person you love is your world, your life, your god... everything. And if anything were to happen to that person, or if they didn't love you, even if they don't tell you directly because you find out just by seeing them kiss someone else... if ANYTHING in the world affects them... you die...

So... when Kendalina was killed...

Ken... you're being awfully quiet...

What's wrong?

The plot thickens.

Leave feedback please! I'll be back in about a month or so... need a break for school and my job.