A Knight's Dolour

[Darth Evandrus]

She wasn’t warm anymore but he didn’t stop clinging to her.

Sat in a rapidly cooling pool of blood, Cregan didn’t much care for how the evidence of his crime soaked into his skin, staining him with the sin he had committed. Intellectually he knew it would wash out but he knew that it wasn’t going to be as easy with everything else. Nothing about this was easy and nothing about this felt right…

But the facts were the facts and there was nothing that could be done to change them – the past could not be altered and the present course he had set himself on could not be averted.

He had killed her.

This was a fact and though he wished he could just ignore it, he knew that he couldn’t. Not when he was sitting in a pool of her blood, her body cradled against his front, arms wrapped tightly around her as she became so very cold. The blood had stopped flowing and the deed was done but he couldn’t bring himself to let her go – if only because he didn’t want to even chance looking at her face.

He sat behind her to cradle her still form to himself because he couldn’t bear to see what he had wrought. The very idea of it wracked his body with violent shivers and he clutched to her desperately. Evidence of the murder he had committed rested right in his arms in a cruel parody of a lover’s embrace.

And all the while the voices spoke.

So many, so many different people with so many different things to say. Seemingly as many daggers to stab him with as there were words in Basic, each of them slipping past his ribs to bury themselves deep inside his heart. Every one of them had an opinion and none of them were kind.

Completed, your task is. A reckoning for your actions and feelings there will be. Submit yourself to detainment you shall.

A task.

Teaching Younglings how to dodge was a task, keeping Jedi morale up was a task. But this? This was not a task – this was an act of barbarism that had been all but demanded of him by the decrepit old toad and now that he had done it, now that he had torn his heart into a million pieces for the Greater Good of the Order he was to be charged for his conduct in doing so.

You have finally done what was necessary… I cannot fault you for that. But for this? For making her love you and using that to kill her? For that I cannot stand the sight of you.

That was Evalyn wasn’t it? It sounded like her and she had encouraged him to tear out his heart back in that meditation chamber. With her ‘guidance’ he had done this awful thing and she would condemn him for it? That was fine. He would condemn himself for this evil undertaking.

How could you do this? You claimed to love her! You were supposed to be my friend and never get this close anyway – you’re a traitor to me and to her! If I ever see you again I will tear you to pieces!

Kal.

All the things he had been worried about for so long, all the things he had feared Kal would speak of when they finally did meet up again. And worse – made all the worse because he had done it, just as Kal said, he had betrayed the man’s trust in him as a friend and he had betrayed her.

Hells, he had killed her!

Cregan looked forwards, his heart stopping as he saw her head start to move, start to turn. Shaking, he found cold, clammy, hands gripping his forearms in place, locking him into the embrace even as the head kept turning. He closed his eyes tightly, willing himself to be free of the grip but finding that the Force didn’t seem inclined to listen to him.

Silence stretched on for what felt like an eternity even though he knew it could only have been seconds. He… he felt her breath, gentle and sweet tasting, as she spoke.

“Do you love me Cregan?”

Had he not been sitting down already, his knees would have given out on him as he felt her breath across his face, heard her speaking as if nothing was wrong. Shaking, he nodded but he knew that wouldn’t be enough – he had to say it.

“Y-yes. I love you with everything that I am…”

He wanted to say more, to apologize, to try and throw himself to the mercy of what appeared to be a mockery made of her corpse. Given time he might have found this entire thing disgusting and offensive to her memory but he didn’t have time. There was only the moment and for the moment she was here – if he kept his eyes closed tight and didn’t think about how cold she was then he could imagine that she was here with him again.

“Shush my love… do not fret. Look at me.”

He couldn’t help but obey.

After what he had done to her, obeying her in this was nothing. Opening his eyes, he choked back a sob as he looked at her, head turned around one hundred and eighty degrees to look back at him. Her throat had turned with her head, the gaping gash his knife had torn still there and her right yellow eyes looking more sickly than ever.

But even still – she was here and he couldn’t find anything better than that right now as his world seemed to be uprooted and spinning ever onwards out of control around him.

“You love me. Will you always love me?”

Somehow… somehow she had turned around entirely in his embrace and she was facing him normally, without the need for a twisted neck. She was sat facing him in the embrace and his arms were now wrapped around her back.

And her hands were inside his chest, clutching at his heart. With her little fingers gripping it so tightly, it couldn’t beat and Cregan looked from her hands to her eyes. He wanted to answer but could not and she began to pull, tearing his heart apart between her fingers...

Unlike the holos, Cregan didn’t start awake and sit up from the nightmare – he just opened his eyes, his heart beating ten to the dozen, and stared up at the ceiling silently, letting what he had seen wash over him as he assured himself that he had, in fact, been dreaming.

This was reality and reality had yet to have had such an outcome and he would continue to cling to the hope that it never would.

Rising from his Spartan bed, he padded silently to the bathroom. Having had experience with nightmares of this calibre in the past, he knew he wasn’t going to be getting back to sleep so he didn’t bother wasting time on trying. Instead he would wake himself up fully and try and find something to occupy himself with in the deathly early hours of the morning. Reaching the sink, he filled his cupped hands with water and scrubbed vigorously at his face before standing to look into the mirror again.

She was there, by the door behind him, just staring at him unblinkingly with her throat still cut open and her hands still clutching the shredded remains of his heart.

He stared at the reflection for a long moment, knowing that she wasn’t actually there, knowing that this was only an illusion created by his tired mind. But still he just kept looking back at her through the reflection in the mirror. It took him a moment to think of something.

She was waiting… waiting for his answer.

Will you always love me?

Such a simple question – five words that took so little effort to say but the answer to which could only come after examining your own soul closely enough to know the answer as well as you knew yourself. Cregan had come to accept the duality of himself and to do that he had had to look into his ‘soul’ so he didn’t find the answer nearly as hard as it could have been.

Staring back into the reflected yellow eyes of his lover’s nightmarish form, he didn’t look away from her eyes as he spoke.

“Always.”

He blinked and she was gone.

And he was left alone – in the Jedi Temple on Jedha, surrounded by Jedi of all sects and divisions at all times and he had never felt more alone. There wasn’t anyone he could turn to here, no one he could talk about this mounting pressure and fear that was building within him.

How would any of the Jedi here understand what it felt like to know that you had a duty to the Order and yet know, with every fibre of your being, that the duty was something you could not ever live with. Something that he could not stomach and something he had no hope of avoiding.

Unless he left.

Left the only life he had ever known in the vague hope that he could have a different life that could accommodate what he felt for her. But… then that wasn’t going to happen either was it? He wasn’t going to join the organised Exiles even if he did leave the Order so he was trapped as he was.

In limbo.

He couldn’t decide so he wouldn’t – at least not yet. For all the feelings of near terror and sorrow, there were just too many positives to both for him to just leave now. A day would come when he would finish making this decision, forcing himself to pick a path.

But it was not this day.

This day he would go back to standing with his feet on both sides of the line and he would do his best to ignore what he knew would happen eventually.

Who was to say? He may very well die before he ever had to make a decision after all.

But until he was either dead or ready to make the decision, he would just keep going as he had for so long now. He would just keep living each day and enjoying what he could find in each one.