He can't remember when he last breathed.
It had been so long ago now and there seemed no end to it at all.
His heart beat and his lungs worked (he'd be no longer of this limbo if they didn't, after all) but he was not living. He was caught in an endless purgatory not being alive, yet also of not dissolving into the Force. He had wronged many in life, and after his task of attempting to take his own life, he had been quickly found by a handful of those he'd wronged and they'd trapped his body. They trapped his body to try and heal it in hopes that, one day, he would awaken and be forced to meet legal justice for his acts of crime in his figuratively short lifetime.
Thinking himself a ghost hadn't been so hard when he figured out he was unable to be seen by the living. It was when he started seeing glowing, humanoid, blue figures on occasion (ones he could never identify for sure, their features obscured just enough by this invisible barrier of different) that he discovered he was a ghost among ghosts as well.
Thus, he was trapped as an between. He was left unable to be seen by either end of the spectrum, for he was just a broken down to energy tied to the awakened and living world. He was of both, yet neither. He was a nothing among the infinite.
He was tethered in endlessness.
Though be he tethered, he was somehow not trapped like those black-and-red, aggressive entities of malformed spirits he had passed in many dark temples. He was able to explore the galaxy. To see time during and after his lifetime, but for some reason never before.
He had seen moments tragically great and horribly agonizing.
He had gone back and relived many things that both weren't and were his to experience.
At first, it did nothing to him. There was a ping of something there in his figurative heart, a rush of things on other occasions ins his emotions that stubbornly refused to be acknowledge, but after witnessing the end of another instant from yet another countless person's experience of it? He had no choice at all, but it was instinctive and utterly unavoidable:
He had reflected on himself.
He hated what he found, and mourned what he didn't find despite how hard he searched.
The boy screams and curses the universe while weeping for forgiveness. He knows not what he is, and he hates who he was, and doesn't even like what he had been before that.
It is all mixing together in a confusing cacophony.
It is a booming loudness with an even more piercing silence.
Its volume is evergrowing.
This and the thickness of his entrapment is all he has to sustain himself. All he has to choke on.
The only things that remind him that, though he seems to have no existence, that there is still something left of himself.
It is only these endlessly thickening sorrows that he has to force into his figurative lungs. To nudge him both towards and away from being lost in the insanity of everything.
Of pains and griefs that both had and hadn't been created by him, and a lot of them were by him, as indirect as some were.
He chokes on more of that odd thickness as the endlessness continued on. And in all this endlessness, he still finds it impossible to recall the last time he was able to breathe.
Was it when he was born? Was it his sister's birth, where their mother breathed her last? Perhaps his breathing stopped when his father began to beat him, drunken sorrows and intoxicated declarations that his son would grow into a perfect man.
It could have stop when his father smacked him across the face, alone in a room, when he was barely eight-years old and forcing him abandon his life to head to the Jedi Order. To make him pretend he wanted to go.
At least the man—tall, imposing, hair long and dark—similar to his father but with kindness and softness, had been the one to take him away.
That he hadn't minded.
The kindness had been a small happiness.
Until he'd realized the man couldn't save his sister too.
He thinks his breathing must have stopped around then, though he is unsure. One thing he is sure of, however, is that it was that it was in that moment when anger had started grow.
The anger, hate, and the darkness within him and grown and festered until the weeds strangled his very soul out from the Garden of the Light within him.
He felt betrayed by those whom he loved (destinies of being taken into death by murder and justice yet unknown), and in response he had turned on the ones who actively loved him. He turned on the man as he saw for the reason for all of his pain, small happiness he had caused forgotten, yet still it was this man who loved him with pure, unconditional feelings.
It was that man he had broken.
A man who had been more of a father in six years than what his birth-father had been in eight years.
He turned on the Jedi Order, for they had caused his pain as well. Sending him for his Knight Trials by intending for him to bring justice upon his own father? Forcing him into a scenario where he would have to watch his little sister and his only living parent die?
"The Jedi of this era were never the best with differences," a wispy something whispers, "even if the differences were children. Those were the worst off."
"One point I'll agree with. There really was no excuse." A something other than the first chimes in.
He always had the feeling the Council hated him—the whispers of "Doesn't he seem too old?" and "His future seems clouded" hadn't escaped the child's ears, for being young does not make one deaf.
He felt ostracized by his peers.
Children were cruel, and being Jedi made no differences. He was different because unlike them, he hadn't been in the Temple since a time of youngness that left no memory of a time before the Jedi Life. He was different, and they made sure he remembered it.
The Order endlessly preached serenity and peace. They had become so wrapped up in that preaching and the haughtiness of their codes that that they ignored (or, perhaps, didn't register) the damage that some of their young faced at the hands of a few others.
They ignored their faults, and ignorance cannot create or maintain true peace.
It also never helped that it was those who defended themselves were also the only ones getting caught.
Defense was always a lot less calculated than offense.
Offense was planned and meditated—it allowed for stealth. Defense was desperation to escape pain.
No one could blame a child for assuming hate was involved when apparent favortism seemed be be happening against their well being for years of their life.
This was a hate that lasted for eight years in the boy's eyes as nothing more than an assumption, until he finally saw it as a proven fact.
For after all, when assumptions had time to fester without acknowledgment of their existence, they need very little to set it off.
What had validated his, however, had been something rather large.
There had been no hope of making him think otherwise.
"It's your fault this all repeated later." Something says.
"Or perhaps," Says the Other Something, "it was the Jedi ignoring what the last time they doing this had brought upon them. Different, yet similar. Forgetting history forces it to need a level of repeating."
"...Time doesn't enjoy parts of its growth being ignored." Something reluctantly agrees.
That damned mission to his original home had seen as nothing more to him than the utmoest cruelty of monsters. Of evil. Of evil by ones who sprouted hate led to Darkness, yet they had done something that couldn't be perceived as nothing else but evil. In his eyes, they had taken him from goodness.
They took his goodness, and he had saved himself from them, for in his point of view the Jedi were the evil ones. All they seemed to ever do was preach of their goodness, but they were evil, because only true monsters protested not being what they actually were.
He never denied what he became.
He marked his right cheek with the ring of the man who had once beat him, and turned on the other man who had raised him. Blade to blade with the intent of death.
He turned his back to face the Dark. He joined with his shadows that, in the least, would admit to their darkness existing. He became a Fallen. A Dark Jedi.
He didn't ever turn back.
He... thinks that he regrets never looking back.
It took him many years to figure this out, but there is definitely regret. A grave, crippling regret. A kind that drowns you, yet leaves the sensation of burning. It left a burning as if one was forced to drink nothing but salty water in some desperate desire for survival.
Surviving until even the survival killed you.
By the Force, why didn't he ever look back?
"There was no point!" Something snaps. "Besides, it felt good to finally feel free."
"It felt good until even that hurt." Other Something reminded, not allowing for a successful reflection of the topic. Something didn't enjoy that happening, but then again it never had.
He doesn't care.
He does NOT care.
He doesn't care, he doesn't care, he doesn't care—
...He doesn't understand why it hurts so much.
He has no idea how long anything had been like anything, for all he knows is that he has been able to see many lifetimes that existed both during and after his time alive, but none before.
Even still, countless lifetimes with no linear way to track made things rather endless.
He has seen joy and pain and joy and pain.
He had seen the success of rebellions and the much too premature fall of those success.
He has seen pain, pain, pain, painpainpainPAIN!
So much pain.
It hurts.
It seems fitting that he feel all the pains of the universe, since he had ignored the pains he had caused.
"Who cares if others face pain? It's not ours! We shouldn't care!" Something screamed.
"But we do!" Other Something screamed back.
"WE DON'T CARE!"
"WE DO CARE!"
"I DON'T WANT TO–"
"–CARE! WE KARKING-"
"DON'T MAKE ME–"
"–CARE! WE–"
"–CARE!" Something was hysteric. It was hoarse, and sounded on the cusp of injured insanity.
"IT HURTS!" Other Something sobbed and screamed, at some point the two's words having swapped. It had been impossible to tell when.
Their dance had mingled to much. The pitches were losing their differences.
"IT HURTS!" They screamed, so in unison. "IT HURTS, BUT WE CARE. IT HURTS! WE CARE! IT HURTS! WE CARE! WECAREWECAREWECAREWECARE–"
"I CARE!" He screamed, and if he was sentient and solid he had no doubt he'd be spewing blood with how roughened his voice had been made by his own screams. "I CARE! I CARE! I CARE!" He fell to figurative knees, in the throws of space and after witness yet another pointless death in the horrible mixture of Dark, Light, love, hate, and every impossible or extreme that was categorized beyond or in between.
"I CARE AND IT HURTS! I KARKING CARE!" He had never felt less unable to breathe. He hadn't been able to breathe in years, despite his puppet of a body being forced to and indirectly trap him to his ghost-ghosts existence. His chest is intangible, but it's constricting. His heart is in a physical body he can't even touch, yet he feels as if it's beating out of his very chest.
It hurts so much.
"MAKE IT STOP!" Xanatos du Crion, the fallen Jedi Padawan of Qui-Gon Jinn, was all but sobbing as he managed to collapse to his figurative knees before another fire of pain and anguish in the galaxy.
His own screams were unable to stop the screams of all else. It was unable to stop the screams he had relived endlessly, and screams he was hearing for the first time.
There was a symphony to this cacophony he had discovered. A song that was to never end. It came at him from the past and present, and there was the faint trilling of it's continued promise to be in the futures to come.
He screamed screams that would leave him breathless if he were to have need of air.
"I CARE! JUST MAKE IT STOP! PLEASE! SOMEONE, ANYONE? JUST MAKE IT ALL STOP! IT HURTS–!"
As screams once more continued to rack the galaxy after another destroyed (but so, so, so painfully short) era of peace, his own were no longer a part of the song.
He was gone.