Evanescent Part 1

Part 1

"This is not my life; this is not our life. Every day I die. This is not my life."

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Dawn was several hours away out in the wilderness of Dantooine, far from the wreckage of the Jedi Academy where many Masters had regrouped after the defeat of the Sith. The humble house was at the foothills of along string of mountains, comfortable beneath the blanket of darkness that enshrouded it with not so much as a sliver of moon to disturb the shadows.

Nights on Dantooine were no longer than they were on most other worlds, but for the couple living in the small isolated house, they were the longest part of the day. Night was when all their feelings came out, whether in intimate passion or long hours of holding each other while one cried on the other's shoulder. Night brought love but also heartrending memories in dreams and visions that neither of them could escape as long as they lived.

Calum and Bastila Jan lay sleeping in their bed together, tired from a long day in the mountains. After seeing more than their fair share of pain and suffering during two brutal wars, they cherished their long walks out on the beautiful plains and hills of Dantooine.

But even a whole day spent enjoying life's exquisite wonders and an evening to share their love in bed wasn't enough to completely banish the pain. It slipped back into them every night while they slept.

Tonight Bastila awoke first, shivering at her dreams of Malak's cruel torture, her fall to the Dark Side, and the hateful things she'd done to Calum as a result. The things Malak had done to her to make her turn, the excruciating physical pain to which he'd subjected her, was nothing compared to what her soul suffered for betraying Calum and the others.

In the darkness of their bedroom she could only see the outline of his muscular figure beside her. She watched his chest rhythmically rise and fall.

She loved him with all her heart, the Jedi Code be cursed.

She would have done anything for him, but she'd tried to kill him on Malak's behalf; the man who brought her nothing but pain. The wrongness of it brought unabashed tears to her eyes, fresh as the first she shed the moment Calum brought her back to the light and freed her love from the shackles of hate.

Bastila threw her arms around her beloved and sobbed as the memories overtook her. It was as if she had rebounded in time and was standing before him once more, her lightsabre threatening him in utter hatred. She fought the hate because she knew it did not belong. But it didn't listen to her feeble cries, labeling Calum the cause of her torment and the one who needed to die. Malak had tortured her to the point where she knew she would do anything for him, if just to make the pain stop. But to have to kill Calum brought a pain unlike anything else. The hate callously overrode the pain. Malak had twisted her loathing of him to be used against the one she loved, and its voice was overpowering, directing her against her will.

Woken by her crying, Calum held her consolingly. Softly, he hushed her sobs, murmuring soothing words into her ears. Gradually, her weeping abated and she fell back to sleep in his arms.

Calum lay awake for some time. He thought about his decision to leave the Jedi Order with Bastila and found once again that he had no regrets. The Jedi Code discouraged love, but love was all he and Bastila had left. Without each other, neither would be able to cope with the memory of the terrible things they'd done. Bastila had at least not killed anyone by her direct actions, but knowing that she had hurt him was a nearly intolerable agony for her. Calum's former actions had known no such restraints.

The Jedi had counted on his old memories resurfacing because they desperately wanted to find the Star Forge and destroy it. But it seemed to Calum as if they had given no thought to what it would do to him as a person.

Memories he would have wished never to have came back to him in uncontrollable storms, and most often they were unrelated to the Star Forge. Calum had come to the bitter realization that they had been prepared to do anything to him; torture his body, mind, and soul if that was what it took for him to lead them to the Star Forge. And now that it was all over, they had no use left for him, but he continued to suffer his emergent past.

He could no longer be simply Calum Jan, a colonial draftee into the Republic Army. He had to be both the Jedi and the Sith Revan as well. He had to hold himself to the moral standards of the Jedi while living with the ever-increasing memories of the atrocities committed by Darth Revan--himself.

Calum realized he was shaking and, not wanting to wake Bastila again, gently laid her head on the pillow and got out of bed. He absently pulled on a pair of pants as he went to stand by the bedroom's single window.

He couldn't stop the visions as they rushed into his head, that dark presence of Darth Revan in his mind inundating him with horror and revulsion. He put his hands to his face anyway, as if he could block out the memories merely by wishing it. But they assaulted him nonetheless, forcing themselves into his consciousness in no particular order or pattern.

He walked with Malak through the halls of the Star Forge, feeling the power of hatred echoing past them...

Expectant faces looked at him, as if he were able to single-handedly halt the onrushing thousands of the Mandalorian army. All he could do was tell them the truth; that likely none of them would survive...

A camp littered with dead, smoking corpses met his eyes. They had not died by the Mandalorians, but by a weapon of their own design gone out of control...

Sith torturers worked their brutal profession on a Jedi Knight while he stalked in the shadows, observing the obscene proceedings...

Warm blood splashed his face, he couldn't tell which of the dying traitors it had come from...

He had given the order, the world below would burn...

An involuntary cry of torment escaped from Calum's throat. The images were too intense, they always were. Tears of futility dampened his hands. How had they expected him to live like this? Grimly, he reminded himself that perhaps he deserved it all; that the Jedi's mercy might have been the worst punishment possible for him.

But whether by accident or design, they had made him into a different person. The man named Calum Jan was being made to suffer for Revan's sins. The Jedi didn't care, it was by their mercy that he was not executed for his crimes.

It was all so senseless!

Revan--Calum felt a comforting hand on his shoulder, felt Bastila move close to him and put her arms around him soothingly, laying her head against his neck to let him know he wasn't alone with his pain. He reached and took her hand as if it were a lifeline; she was his lifeline, his safeguard from the horror of Darth Revan that always waited beneath the surface. She made the shadows flee for him. Her presence made everything better, she made the cold truth of reality bearable.

Calum couldn't figure out how he had ever managed in life without her. She made him complete. Her love brightened his world even at the darkest of times, as it did now. And he loved her back passionately, in spite of everything the Jedi taught that forbade love. The Jedi Code was rendered inconsequential; passion was peace.

After a while, Calum realized he'd stopped crying.

"It was the visions again?" Bastila asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Calum nodded, not trusting his voice to speak.

Slowly, gently, Bastila eased him from the window, back to bed. They both fell asleep in each others' arms.

 

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He walked among thousands of white figures, feeling a cold mask over his face. The teeming masses around him looked identical to one another, and he realized he must have fit right in, without a distinguishing feature to tell him apart from those surrounding him. He was not a person, just a faceless fragment of the greater whole, a soulless drone.

At once, the thousands in the square dropped to their knees and touched the foreheads of their featureless white masks to the ground. He followed out of instinct, knowing failure to conform to the whole was a crime that would bring about his swift death. Words were chanted that he could not understand, and everyone lifted their heads in unison to behold a figure who stood before them on a balcony overlooking the square.

When he looked up, all he could see was the death scream of a planet full of life, a world torn apart with thundering violence. He felt the very fabric of life tearing around him, pain reverberating through the Force itself. There was an echo, traveling the rim of the galaxy, extinguishing life as it passed and remained in perpetuity, an endless death.

His eyes were blinded by a harsh flash of light reflecting off a polished silver hull. He saw giant ships passing through the dead space. Thousands upon thousands of them. They filled the skies of a hundred worlds, their fury reduced cities to ash, hills to glass, and they brought forth millions of white, faceless soldiers to enslave those who survived.

He saw them assemble innocent civilians into lines that stretched from horizon to horizon and execute them by the hundreds of thousands. With each death, he felt the Force grow weaker.

High in the sky, the sun was fierce as it shone down on the killing fields. He turned his eyes toward it, preferring blindness to the sight of so much innocent blood.

Calum flinched at the morning light in his eyes that pulled him from his dreamworld. It shone with rebellious irreverence into him and Bastila's bedroom, a stern ray shining straight in his face. The light was a welcome relief from the troubles of the night.

Her head nestled in the crook of his shoulder and neck, Bastila awoke from her light sleep when Calum put up a hand to block the harsh sunlight from his sleep-fogged eyes. She yawned slightly, cast a glance out the window.

"Beautiful morning," she muttered into Calum's ear.

He smiled a little. "Yes, it is. It came right on schedule."

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. "It always does, Calum."

He was grateful for the sun's timeliness, every morning it helped pull him out of his constant nighttime misery. In morning's light it was easier to forget everything he remembered, or thought he did, about Darth Revan and who he knew he really was. The light helped him forget, but only Bastila could help him understand.

As he lay in bed beside his wife, Calum started to realize what he had to do.

"Bastila," he whispered. "I have to leave."

 

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In shock, Bastila sat up in the bed and gaped at her husband. She knew the returning memories of his past life had been bringing him pain she could only taste and never fully appreciate, but she'd never considered it might take him from her. She couldn't imagine him leaving, shivered at the very thought.

A feeble "Why?" was all she could manage at first.

By his pained expression, she knew it was just as hard, if not harder, for him to say it as it was for her to hear him saying it. Calum sighed deeply as he laid his head back on the pillow

"Please don't think this means I don't love you. I do, Bastila, always. And if I thought I could find a reason to believe I'm mistaken, I wouldn't ask this of you."

Swallowing, Bastila regained control over her voice. "Just tell me, Calum."

He closed his eyes and put a hand to his temples. "It used to only be Revan that caused me grief. The Force knows everything I remember I want to forget, and it seems every new memory is only more horrible and terrifying than the last.

"I hate remembering those things. But I do realize that they are a part of me, and only if I can come to terms with them will I ever be able to find true peace. So, in a way, I am glad to receive them even for all the misery those memories cause me. And more than anything, you make it possible for me live with myself. If I didn't have you, I might not be able to deal with the things I see in my dreams."

Bastila blinked back a tear as Calum continued.

"The past two weeks have been different for me, Bastila. It's not just Revan anymore; I have visions I can't understand but that I somehow know are connected to what's happening to me. It's getting harder for me to separate my dreams and visions from reality, and I'm being overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of comprehension without understanding.

"I see people without faces dressed in white, bowing by the millions under willing slavery, and those same teeming numbers pouring forth to exterminate the Force. This vision is connected to me in ways I can't fathom but Revan understood. He's trying to tell me something, trying to claw his way out from the veil in my mind he was sealed behind, and everything he shows me only gets more intense.

"I don't have the answer to what's happening to me, and Revan can't give it to me. All his attempts have done is drive me further into a misery that drags you down with it. So I have to seek the answer on my own. I can't keep inflicting my troubles on you and Juhani. It's unfair to both of you.

"Somewhere out there is an answer, the truth behind the lies. I have to find it or I will die. And I can't take anyone with me, or they will share in my fate. Bastila, I can't do that to you; I have to know you'll be here, alive and waiting for me when I can return. You're the only thing that lets me continue on."

Bastila sat still for a moment, absorbing Calum's words. She was quite a while in forming her response.

"Calum, I know how hard it can be for you at night. I know only a fraction of the pain your memories must cause you, and the strength you must have to deal with them." She leaned down on the bed to touch her hand to Calum's face. "Both we both know that neither of us can muster the will to continue but from the other. Calum, that's why we married; because we knew neither could live without the other."

"But Bastila, I can't--" She put a finger to his lips when he tried to protest.

"Calum, don't ever say that you bring your troubles on me. You don't. It is because of you I was saved from the Dark Side, and because of your forgiveness I can live with the things I've done. And if anyone has brought troubles on someone, it is I who have done so, because I alone bear responsibility for burying your mind. I know you've forgiven me, but I will never forgive myself for what we did to you.

"I owe you, Calum. You do not owe me. I will not leave your side."

"But if something happens to me," Calum whispered, "I have to know you're safe."

"I can think of no place I could be safer, than with you." She slid back on the bed to lie beside him, grasped his hand. "Maybe we'll let Juhani come with us. She would make sure of it."

A smile came to Calum's face. "Besides," he said, "even I don't let her, she'll follow me anyway."

Bastila giggled at the thought. She certainly would.

Juhani had followed them for days after their honeymoon, so she would be around to protect the both of them. Three days into their solitude on the plains of Dantooine, the Cathar was forced to reveal herself to them when she caught and killed three Sith assassins in their home. Calum had been speechless with gratitude, and Bastila invited her to stay with them. Juhani had kept them company ever since.

"I'm sorry, Bastila, you're right. I honestly don't know what I'd do without you."

He kissed her then; passionately, desperately. She sighed against the feel of his lips, his warm body pressed against hers.

There would be time to leave later. But for a few minutes neither of them worried about what lay ahead. For a few minutes they had each other, and that was all that mattered.

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End Part 1

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Disclaimer: The song quote in the beginning is taken from the Demon Hunter song 'Summer Of Darkness' and belongs to them, not me.