Summary: A really angsty fic I wrote when I was feeling, pretty much, at the end of my rope. I'm better now, but this lives on: the remnant of my friendship with the darkness.

Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars. All hail George Lucas.

It was a place I'd been before, thousands of times, touching on it and scattering away like leaves on the autumn that never came to the planet of Coruscant – the home that I could never stay with, the falseness that I could never quite understand. Looking out on the city through the broken window, my own voice echoed back at me: "I need him!" Was it, in the end, a lie? There was a darkness, a dragon, within me. I used it for power. It wasn't supposed to turn on me, but there was something about the fire that I felt flaming into the palms of my hands, something about the raw passion of anger and hatred that so enticed me to stay in the shadows just a little longer.

There was nothing civilized about my lightsaber strokes anymore. The tears running down my face into my beard hadn't stopped flowing since my boots had touched the burning planet of Coruscant. I could feel Master Yoda near, and yet he was far, far away. The only thing I really felt was the twisting wail of agony in my mind as I fought, and the echoes of what I knew had happened in this place. A hurricane of melancholy, rage, hatred, and suffering whirled around the Jedi Temple – my home, my salvation, no longer peaceful. No words could have suited my agony, and thus I spoke none, just let the force pour through me; even its power, touching me, seemed unbearable. I fought for control, to bring myself back into peace, even as I cut down clone trooper after clone trooper. More than ever before, I wanted to turn my eyes from the nightmarish vision I knew to be true, the terrible feeling that I knew exactly who had done this. But my brother would never have slaughtered like this…

In that lightning stroke of two lightsaber blades, they connected: blue eyes to blue eyes, faces reflecting the agony of their brothers', nightmares whirling around them, all the things that they had never dared say aloud, all the things that they had never dared allow into the thickness of the tension between them. Lightsaber blades crossed, and pain flared, as the fires of Mustafar raged higher on a diet of twisted, wailing hatred, anger, rage, agony, and despair.

He never listened to me. I was just the Padawan. If he had it his way, I always would be. He would never let me off the leash, never understand that there were other ways to use power, to feel it. He would never understand that there had to be more to life outside of the sheltered world of "Jedi Business". He would never understand me. Somehow, I sensed that even this lovely creature before me, the woman I loved so much against the Code of the way I ought to be, wouldn't ever understand me, not completely.

Through the rain of the battle, I could barely see, I could barely breathe, and yet I still thought of my Padawan, how I knew that something would come of this guarding business that the Council had assigned him. Every beat of my heart seemed to say, Padawan, be careful…and the next begged him to trust himself. I might be there, fighting Jango Fett, but my heart was with my son, my brother, struggling to distinguish him from the Chosen One, struggling to make him something real.

Oh, brother, do what is right…

Whispers touched the air around them, the hiss of lightsaber against silence. They are breaking dangerous ground; they are tiptoeing a finer line than ever before, and each is aware of it, even when they're focused on rescuing the Chancellor, even when their lightsabers act together, as allies, to take apart first Dooku, then to escape Grievous. As the ship burns up in the atmosphere, with Artoo babbling worriedly in the background, with the Chancellor worriedly silent, the two are connected as brothers; the two are fighting to understand. With a glance, over a decade of friendship is displayed, over a decade of trust. And one is painfully aware of the secret the other is keeping, and the other is denying that he knows. In that single glance, though, no one can pretend.

The nightmare blades crash again, blue blades reflecting blue eyes joined in a glance that is much different this time: full of shattered trust, love, hate, desperation, despair, pain, and the seeds of nightmares. Brothers turned against one another, a friendship destroyed in the single act of rage that found the surface, the single act of fear. Each that they trusted the most, each that they worked their lives long with. Their names would never again be spoken as one; both would cease to exist as they had been, each reduced with the loss of his best friend. Even through the rage of words thrown at one another, through the sing and hiss of lightsaber blades forced into battle, through the panic of fire and machinery, there is a bitter silence that may never be healed.