Chapter Fourteen
"So I gotta ask… how did you do that? That thing where you leaped up on that tall-ass platform and almost made Kuril drop his rifle before you skewered him? I'm a fucking master of biotics and I can't do that shit."
Revan glanced back over her shoulder, barely able to suppress a grimace as Jack squeezed past a glowering HK to follow her back onto the Normandy. The anger and hate that clung to her like a shroud was even more grating up close than it had been while trailing her through Purgatory. Revan didn't want to deal with her; she didn't even want to be around her, but unfortunately Jack didn't appear to feel the same way.
She had stumbled into the room where they were fighting Warden Kuril and a full squad of his mercenaries, loud, raw and angry… and a handy distraction. Revan had taken full advantage of it by destroying his final shield generator with a tossed lightsaber and leaping straight up onto the platform Kuril had been sniping from. She had surprised him enough that it had only taken a couple of quick swings to take him down.
Ever since then, Jack had been tossing question after question at her, all the while watching her with big, expressive eyes full of a mixture of awe and something uncomfortably close to hunger. Not a wholesome hunger, like a crush, but something a little more selfish. Ostensibly she had agreed to join Shepard's team because the commander had granted her full access to Cerberus' records, but Revan suspected that wasn't the only reason.
Jack had no idea how loudly she was broadcasting her real feelings through the Force – how could she? – but Revan felt it all, as though the woman's mind was laid bare for her to read. She tried very hard not to, but it was like trying to ignore someone who was standing in front of her, screaming in her face.
Someone – Cerberus, apparently – had done a real number on her. The hunger and awe Revan felt from the woman made her uncomfortable, but it was just a veneer really, a disguise for the pain and fury hidden beneath. A mask that concealed a desire to be powerful enough to never have to go through such pain again. She saw that power in Revan and wanted it for herself.
Revan could hardly blame her, but that didn't change how little she wanted to be around the slight, tattooed woman. Having such a raw well of emotion so close by set her teeth on edge. It was a constant reminder of the power she could have at her command, if she would only give in and allow herself to wield it.
She was gripping her lightsabers so hard the ridges were digging into her palms. Deliberately she forced herself to relax and let them go before she responded. "I'm not a biotic," she explained shortly. "I'm a…" I'm a Jedi. She couldn't find it in herself to say it. Not after what she had just done on Purgatory. "I have a different source of power."
Jack eyed her distrustfully, ducking out of the way as Shepard and Matt stepped past. Shepard headed for the cockpit, mind still full of churning anxiety, and Matt in the opposite direction toward the CIC, thoroughly absorbed in his own thoughts. Neither seemed to notice the tension in the air between Jack and Revan, though Matt cast her a lingering glance as he passed. There was… a lot in that glance: apprehension, a similar awe to Jack's, and guilt, among other things, but he didn't say anything.
"A different source of power? Like what?" Jack smirked, dragging Revan's attention back. "Wires?"
At any other time, that would have prompted at least a fleeting smile, but she was tense and tired and didn't particularly want to try and explain the Force all over again just yet. "No," she replied. Briefly, but not unkindly.
Instead of getting annoyed, as Revan half-expected her to, Jack snorted and shrugged. "Have it your way. I'm gonna ask you again, though." She set her hands on her hips and took a good look at their surroundings. They had paused in the corridor leading from the bridge to the cockpit, with HK looming silently – for once – in his favourite position at Revan's shoulder. "This whole place is way too open for me. I'm gonna head down to engineering or storage or something and hole up there. That's where I'll be if you decide you want to chat."
Without looking back, Jack strode off down the corridor. Revan watched her as she moved through the bridge, paying no attention to the wary stares she was getting from the Cerberus crew. Part of her wished that she could let the perceived opinions of others roll off her back so easily too.
"What a ray of sunshine," Kasumi commented wryly from behind her.
"She's tough," Revan murmured. "I think she's been fighting her whole life."
The thief shrugged. "Tough is what we need, I guess," she replied. "Catch you later, Rev. I have a date with a certain weapons specialist."
Revan raised her eyebrows. "A date?" she repeated.
Walking backwards down the corridor toward the bridge, Kasumi laughed. "Maybe that was too polite a word."
Despite herself, Revan snorted in amusement at that. "Have fun," she said.
"What's going on?" came Shepard's voice from behind her.
"Kasumi has designs on Jacob Taylor," Revan told her, amusement already fading as she realised she was clutching the solid, reassuring grip of one of her lightsabers again. She wasn't entirely sure if Commander Shepard would find it amusing at all, actually, she thought distractedly. The thief sure moved quickly, and relations between members of the same squad were rarely a good idea...
"Oh." Shepard frowned and glanced in the direction of the armoury, but she was clearly distracted too. "Uh… okay. Come on, let's go grab a bite to eat."
Revan didn't feel much like eating, but she dismissed HK to return to her quarters and followed Shepard to the mess. A far as Revan could tell, it was an hour or so after the evening meal, according to ship's time, so the mess was empty. Shepard grabbed food for the both of them from Mess Sergeant Gardner, rightly assuming that Revan wouldn't know what to ask for, and they took a table in a corner away from the main thoroughfare.
Shepard was quiet for a while as she took her seat, the only sounds in the mess those of Gardner packing up for the night. Revan waited, contemplating her food in silence. The commander probably had questions after what had happened when they went up against those two YMIRs. Revan didn't blame her; she would probably have questions herself if their positions were reversed.
Finally, Shepard sighed, picked up her meal – some sort of meat with what she thought might be vegetables, between two slices of flatbread – and took a bite. She chewed, swallowed, then said, "I messed up today."
Revan frowned. Shepard had messed up? The mission had been difficult, but they had gotten it done with no losses and succeeded in recruiting Jack. Shepard hadn't been the one who messed up. She opened her mouth to say so, but Shepard hadn't finished.
"I need to understand you better, Revan," she continued, her frustration obvious. "Your abilities, your strengths and particularly your weaknesses. You're…" she cast about for the right words, "An enigma. And I can't plan effectively for an unknown." She shook her head. "I brought you along today when I shouldn't have. That became very clear. Oh, you did a great job looking out for Matt," she clarified quickly, "but really, he didn't need that much looking after. Certainly not a full-time bodyguard. And having you stuck in that role diminished your usefulness and slowed us down." Shepard made a face. "And don't even get me started on that fight against the YMIRs. We were lucky you can shoot lightning from your fingers, or we would have been stuck in that warehouse long enough for things to go even more to shit than they already were. We could have been overrun with more mercs, or more YMIRs…" She trailed off, grimacing. "Or Jack could have made it to the Normandy and decided she wanted a ship of her own."
"None of that happened," Revan reminded her. So this was what the commander had been preoccupied with for the latter half of the mission.
Shepard leaned forward. "Because we got lucky. And you had to risk using the dark side, however that works." She paused. "No, I fucked up. I've never seen abilities like yours, Revan. You can do some amazing things. I let myself get so excited about it that I assumed you didn't have any weaknesses that would be relevant to this galaxy. I've been treating you like you're some kind of superheroor something." She gave Revan a hard stare. "But you're not, are you? You're human, just like me."
Revan couldn't help a momentary flash of defensiveness, but she stifled it quickly. This wasn't a dressing-down. Shepard wasn't saying Revan was deficient; she was saying she herself had failed as a leader. "I don't know what a superhero is," she said carefully instead.
Shepard smiled fleetingly. "A being with extraordinary powers who fights evil, and usually possesses very few flaws."
Revan couldn't help a snort. "I'm certainly not that, then."
"The bit about extraordinary powers is right, though, and I don't understand them as well as I need to," Shepard admitted frankly. "I don't understand how you… work. Your Force is certainly not the same as our biotics. That lightning, for instance. That was the dark side?" Revan nodded, though the question was mostly rhetoric. "What else is the dark side? How do I know that if I ask you to do something, I'm not asking you to use the dark side? And why is that so bad, anyway?" She took a bite of her meal, the movement probably more violent than necessary. "I don't want to put you in danger like that again, and I don't want to go into another combat situation without full, comprehensive knowledge of my team's capabilities. Help me understand, Revan."
Revan looked away from Shepard and down at her food, giving herself a moment to think.
She couldn't allow Shepard to take the blame for everything that had happened on Purgatory when it was at least partly, if not mostly, her own fault. She should have sat down with the commander and explained everything as soon as it became clear she was on the ground team. But she still hadn't fully trusted Shepard, so she had held back, just so she could have a skifter up her sleeve.
That wasn't all of it, though, she had to admit. If she was going to explain her abilities, that meant explaining more about the dark and light sides of the Force, and that meant explaining exactly why it was so important she stay away from the dark. It meant telling Shepard about who she really was. The full story. Was she ready for that? Was Shepard ready for that?
She wasn't sure if it was the Force prompting her, or just the strange kinship she felt for this woman from another galaxy, but something told her the answer to both of those questions had become 'yes'.
She took a deep breath and looked up, meeting Shepard's waiting gaze. "All right. For you to understand fully, you need to know more about who I am… and who I was."
"Darth Revan, Dark Lord of the Sith."
"Yes." The word almost caught in her throat, but Revan continued anyway. "But it's not as simple as an ominous title."
"It rarely is." Shepard sat back in her chair, watching.
Revan thought for a moment about where to begin. "A few standard weeks ago, I woke up on board a ship that was being boarded by the Sith – Malak's troops, an army of dark Jedi and their soldiers. As far as I knew, I was a soldier of the Republic – that's our galactic government – named Asha."
Shepard frowned and opened her mouth, but changed her mind and closed it again.
"I met Carth on that ship, and we escaped to the planet below, where we rescued a Jedi named Bastila. Over time, she became like a sister to me; it was through her that I discovered I was Force-sensitive. Being Force-sensitive means you have the potential to become a Jedi Knight," Revan explained. "I was – am – on the upper end of that spectrum, and untrained Force-sensitives can be dangerous. Bastila judged it best to take me to the Jedi enclave on Dantooine to be trained as a Jedi."
Shepard continued to listen, thoughtfully chewing her flatbread. Revan picked up her own, but set it down again, unable to muster an appetite.
"It was on Dantooine that I learned about Darth Revan. Revan was once a Jedi Knight herself, but she rebelled against the Order during a galactic war in which the Jedi and the Republic were allies, fighting a powerful Mandalorian army. She defeated this army in a decisive battle, but it cost thousands of innocent beings their lives. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. This loss of life was, debatably, unnecessary." Shepard's eyes hardened, but Revan pushed on as dispassionately as she could. "At some point, perhaps even before this battle, Revan turned to the dark side of the Force. A legion of Jedi followed her, including her apprentice, Malak, and together they left for the Unknown Regions. They stayed there for a good five years." Revan paused, took a deep breath and steeled herself, then continued. "When Revan returned, it was with a fleet of her own, at the head of an empire. She began a new war against her former allies, and she was brutal. Unstoppable. She conquered swathes of planets and whole star systems, killing millions of people, destroying homes and families and subjugating the rest. I'm told it was like the Mandalorian Wars all over again, but worse, because Revan knew all of the Republic's weaknesses. How to hit them where it hurt.
"And then, at the height of her power… she was betrayed by her own apprentice, Darth Malak, and killed by a Jedi strike team."
"What?" Revan could sense the hair-trigger wariness that had slowly built up in Shepard as she listened. She was alert now, worried, and a little frightened, and that last statement had thrown her.
"So the story goes." Revan deliberately kept her posture relaxed and non-threatening, but ignored the exclamation for now. "But I'll come back to that.
"Revan should not have been able to build an entire fleet in just five years, let alone supply and crew it, and Malak certainly shouldn't have been able to maintain it after her death. The Jedi Council knew the dark side was involved somehow, so they sent my team and I on a mission to find the source of Darth Malak's – and Revan's – power. We found it – or rather, we found out how to get to it – but we were captured by Malak." She paused. "It was then I learned that the Jedi, and Bastila, had been lying to me. I was, in fact, the Dark Lord Revan herself."
"But she—you—died." There was something strange in Shepard's expression as she said that, but Revan couldn't put her finger on it.
She slowly shook her head. "No. The Jedi strike team managed to capture me instead. And after that… the Jedi Council wiped my mind."
A thousand micro-expressions flitted across Shepard's face. "Wiped your mind? What do you mean?"
"They erased my memories, and replaced them with those of a Republic soldier named Asha." Revan shrugged, but she was wholly unable to suppress a deep, abiding anger at what they had done. "I didn't ever question them. I didn't know there was anything to question."
The commander sat back, expression wavering between shock, revulsion, and righteous anger. Revan was certain that revulsion was aimed at what the Council had done, rather than at her personally, but still she shied away from examining it too closely. She was used to Darth Revan being reviled by now – thanks, in large part, to Carth always being around to remind her – but the thought of Shepard doing the same filled her with sadness.
"I thought they were supposed to be the good guys," Shepard finally growled.
"I don't know why they did it," Revan told her truthfully. "It's inarguable that something had to be done. I don't remember much of my time as Darth Revan, just flashes here and there. Feelings. Tastes, smells. Like the smell of burning bodies on Omega." She exchanged a knowing look with Shepard. "The little I do remember adds weight to the idea that Darth Revan had to be stopped. She – I – did a lot of terrible, terrible things. I don't remember any of them, let alone why I did them, but the dark side is powerful. I may not have needed – or wanted – a reason." She looked away, fingers tingling with the echo of lightning. She folded her arms across her chest. It was strange, knowing that she was Darth Revan, but not being able to remember for herself why that was a bad thing. And feeling even guiltier for the fact that she didn't feel enough guilt.
"Maybe it was justified, then," Shepard said quietly. "Could you… become that person again? The Dark Lord of the Sith?"
There it was. The whole reason she was having this conversation. And she knew she didn't have a good enough answer. She suppressed a shiver. All she had was the truth.
"I ask myself that every day," she admitted. "I ask myself if I could become Darth Revan again, and by extension, if wiping my mind was necessary. The Jedi could have imprisoned me and tried to turn me back to the light. The Jedi Code practically requires it. They didn't have to do what they did. They took everything. Not just the Dark Lord. Everything. I don't remember my life before the wars either. My family. My home. None of that has come back. I don't know if it ever will."
"Shit," Shepard muttered.
"Maybe it's what I deserve." Revan shook her head sadly. "I don't want to fall again. With every fibre of my being, I fight it every day. When I get a taste of the light side, like the other day on Omega, it gets easier. But when I get a reminder of the power of the dark, like earlier today…"
"It reminds you of the power you could have, if you only allowed yourself to wield it," Shepard finished for her, unwittingly putting word to Revan's own earlier thought. Which only made it worse. "It makes it harder to resist."
Revan grimaced. "Like a black hole sitting just over my shoulder, trying to pull me in. The answer is yes, Shepard. I could become Darth Revan again. And that would be… disastrous."
Shepard nodded slowly, and Revan saw understanding beginning to dawn in her eyes. "Such a person cannot be allowed to run free in this galaxy, with no Jedi to oppose them. One existential threat at a time, please." The attempt at lightness fell flat. Shepard stared at her for a while, and Revan fought a sudden compulsion to whither away from that stare. She didn't, holding the commander's gaze with what she hoped was a level stare of her own, trying to convey the fact that she had been completely honest with her. About everything.
Finally Shepard continued, resolve filling her eyes. "But you're not that person, Revan. Not anymore. I know I've only known you for a short while, but I can tell you're not… evil. Not like that. I won't condemn you for something you might do in the future. I'll help you however I can."
Revan released a breath she hadn't realised she had been holding as relief flooded through her. "Thank you," she murmured quietly, but sincerely. For the first time since Bastila was taken from her, it felt like she wasn't alone with her burden.
"How do I do that, though? Help you?" Shepard asked, sitting forward. "Besides not asking you to shoot lightning from your fingers again."
"There's not much you can do," Revan told her reluctantly. "The responsibility is mine, and it's something only I can manage. But if I seem to be acting from a place of pure emotion – particularly anger – you can try to warn me. Carefully." It was something, she thought. There was a small possibility it might work… and if it didn't, Shepard had the skills to at least have a chance of getting away with her life.
"Right. I can do that." Shepard nodded thoughtfully. "And I have an idea. I don't know about you, but I get angry really quickly when I'm stressed. I know just the thing to relieve some stress."
Revan found her lips twitching in amusement at that, the heaviness of the previous subject matter already beginning to fade with relief. "Really, Shepard? I didn't know you were interested."
"I—huh?" The commander blinked, then caught on. "Oh. Unfortunately you're not my type," she replied with a wry laugh. "I do know the next best thing, though. Are you familiar with the term 'drinking until you can't see straight'?"
Revan felt her smile grow. "No, but I can guess the gist."
"Excellent." Shepard set her palms on the table and got to her feet. "Come on. I've got a couple of bottles of tequila conveniently stashed in a cabinet in Starboard Observation. Let me introduce you to this galaxy's version of alcohol."