The Lamentations of Fortunate Children

Laeonas Tannaras

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Escape had been a terrifying event.

Laeonas had stumbled into the hangar, eyes darting around for ships. Near everything in the hangar was gone, and the boy had needed to pick his escape vessel in mere seconds. He'd been lucky enough to stumble into a ship that at a minimum only needed a single pilot.

The freighter's bay was open, and it's cargo hold was empty. Slipping through, he'd punch the large "CLOSE" button right inside repeatedly, causing the exit ramp to pull up and shut behind him; but by that point, he was already in the cockpit.

The boy had never once flown a ship before; his experience in piloting was limited to speeders. Yet he recognized enough of the controls to have at least some idea of what he needed to do to get the ship-- his ship-- out of the hangar.

Awkwardly the vessel pulled out of the vault facility, and as Laeonas pulled the controls backwards, they'd point up into the sky. Breaking through clouds at a barely safe speed, the ship would breach the atmosphere and entire the void of space.

It had only been seconds later that the bombardment had started.

Turbolasers blanketed the arid world's surface. He registered that a great number of the ships were focused on a particularly small stretch of land on the surface, and it didn't take much from the boy to determine that it had been where he-- and his ship-- had been less than a minute earlier.

It was also where the Sith had been left to die.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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Somewhere in the void of space,
hours following Laeonas' Escape
From Mataou


Staring out the only viewport on the freighter, Laeonas had kept the position he'd been in for the hours it had been since he'd left. Bright eyes stared out into the endless blackness of space, whose uniformity was only broken by the ocean of stars that stretched across the void.

He hadn't entered hyperspace, partially because he still wasn't sure how, and because he was to stunned to even more. Still, with how fast the freighter was going, and with how long it had been, the actual planet was a distant dot that he'd left behind. He hadn't seen it, and neither did he need to. The planet had been reduced to a dead ball.

But he was alive. Laeonas had managed to escape Mataou's fiery end by the skin of his teeth, and he still couldn't believe it.

For the first time in hours, the boy's gaze shifted away from the viewport. Eyes rotated in their sockets to point downwards, while his neck craned so he could get a look at himself.


He still reeked of rotting flesh, despite having stripped down to almost nothing when he still believed getting into the vault was even a possibility. The boy's lightly muscled frame was bare above the waste. Uncharacteristically pale skin reflected the little light in the cockpit, a mixture of blues, reds and yellows that would've been drowned out by brighter overhead lighting if he'd bothered to turn them on.

Against all odds, he was here, and not under a pile of rubble.

Someone else was though.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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Somewhere in the void of space,
days following Laeonas' Escape
From Mataou


Exploring the ship, and her controls, was a task that took the weary young man longer than it should've.

The vessel was entirely unremarkable, with only a few noticeable changes. The ship's ID codes had been changed a number of times based off of the automated records of all the places it had landed and subsequently been registered. Based off of those records and the ship's physical modifications, Laeonas was able to figure out the purpose of the ship's prior owners.

The worlds in question were unassuming on their own-- all controlled by the Hutts and all functioning more or less as slave pits.

The realization only came after he'd taken his first trip back down to the cargo hold. He'd pressed his back against all wall, only for the panel he'd been pressed against to fall off.

He'd been about to swear as he spun around, only to discover that the panel in question was still connected to the wall by chains-- and attached to the panel were shackles. The panel was a basic cot-- and he realized that the walls were lined with them.

Laeonas had stolen a slave ship.

-----------

There had been a disgusting irony in his choice of escape vessel being one that was kept to transport people in bondage, rather than save them from certain death.

It didn't amuse Laeonas as much as it normally would've. He'd been finding it difficult to concentrate, and the conditions on the ship weren't comfortable.


Grounded for what had to have been several weeks, the ration packs were either spoiled or rotting, meaning the all to familiar experience of hunger had begun to set in. The boy could fend off starvation for longer than most, employing the force to keep his body sustained in the absence of food. If he was truly pushed towards his limits, the boy could enter a meditative trance that could slow down his metabolism, stretching out the time it would take for him to starve from 2-4 weeks to as long as three months.

While all of this was theoretically possible, it didn't change the fact that the boy's feelings of hunger wouldn't change even if he wasn't at risk of dying for months. To some extent he doubted that it would be necessary-- food wouldn't be an issue once he found a safe system to land in.

The astrogation charts could take him to most systems in the Outer Rim without incident. Once he engaged the hyperdrive, he could travel as far away as Nar Shaddaa. Still, he didn't want to wait that long; he needed to get to a system in his current neighborhood.

...but that presented another challenge.

The ID codes on his ship were still registered to the Hutts-- an issue that the authorities on most world would bring up once he landed. He doubted he'd have to deal with rangers (force forbid) but the idea of him escaping Mataou and immediately falling into the custody of a world's local police force wasn't something that appealed to him.

The boy stared at himself, the reflection muddied in the uncleaned mirror within the refresher. He'd been contemplating his options for days, never being able to concentrate on any one thing-- mostly because it'd be broken by the exact same train of thought, brought on by the same images.

Closing his eyes, he tried to focus-- only to be met by the same vision of the Sith's body shaking as lethal levels of electricity tore through her flesh.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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Somewhere in the void of space,
more than a week
following Laeonas' Escape
From Mataou


The boy sat in the empty cargo hold, hands clasped together as he attempted to concentrate. His condition had only gotten worse in the previous days, and the boy was now as sleep deprived as he was hungry; now the pain was as much physical as it was psychological-- and the dominoes of pain continued to his own emotions as well.

With the continuing bombardment of images of the Sith came feelings of grief and empathy. To be left alone for the final seconds of your life, to know that death would come and that there was no way to stop it... the boy's heart couldn't help but ache.

Laeonas had rarely contemplated his mortality-- the inevitable fate of all things that lived. That had changed gradually as the years had passed him by; first on Dantooine, when he had to consider the very real possibility that he had just barely survived the landing-- and that he could very well meet his end on the world from a variety of threats. Worse was the possibility that he might never escape-- never to see another sentient being, and to die decades later as a hermit, forgotten by the galaxy.


More recently had been his contemplation of his early life; how he had always been close to starvation, or brushed close with death in a number of fights and shootouts. He was fragile-- a being made of flesh and bone that could easily be ended if he wasn't careful. That had become increasingly clear when he was on Mataou, where he'd had so many close calls with death that he was still shocked that he'd managed to escape.

Even more rare were the times he considered the feelings of others who had died-- and now, it was all he could think of. What kind of terror must the Sith have felt? What kind of pain did she endure when the electricty ran through her body? How drawn out were her final moments-- did the facility's crumbling structure collapse and destroy her in an instant, or was she trapped, slowly suffocating under rubble that would never be moved?

And what if it had been him?


Laeonas was stuck spiraling into what would've happened had she been in his position. He always came to the same conclusion-- that the Sith would've left him to die without a second thought or a shred of remorse. It wasn't even a question of if-- he was certain of it.

But what did that make him?

If the Sith would've done it, what separated the two of them? He still didn't know much about the lightsaber weilding, lightning shooting enemies of the Jedi, but from all he'd gathered they seemed to be complete monsters. Some of the actions attributed to either the entire order he'd read made even the most cruel gang bosses he'd met look compassionate and forgiving.

Some Dark Lords, the rulers of the Sith, were responsible for the slaughter of billions, building empires in wars that resulted in corpse piles that were taller than skyscrapers.

Some performed rituals, building monuments to the dark side or casting spells on worlds that left them permanently tainted, or cleansed of life.

The most recent dark lord that had won dominion over the galaxy had even ordered the construction of a mechanical monstrosity of a space station that was equipped with a planet killing weapon-- hell, he'd apparently ordered the construction of entire armadas worth of them.

To cast your lot in with a group whose most infamous leaders had body counts higher than he could comprehend had to make you either completely deluded, or a monster. He'd met a number of Sith-- all were either completely fine with committing acts Laeo didn't think he could ever stomach, or were so completely fanatical that they believed that the mass conquest of world's and domination of the galaxy were actually good for it's people.

And the woman he'd left to die belonged to them.

Groaning, the boy pulled at his hair in frustration and pain. Glancing across the room, the beskar was where he'd left it-- and the Sith's lightsaber was still in his pocket.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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Somewhere in the void of space,
more than a week
following Laeonas' Escape
From Mataou


"Why me?" He whispered.

Laeonas' eyes were transfixed on the shimmering crimson blade. The contrast between the light aquamarines against the pulsing red was something he'd become entirely familiar with in the past few days. Hours were spent in the refresher, practicing the meditative trance that would keep him alive until he could finally bring himself to engage the hyperdrive.

Mataou and her star were a number of milliparsecs away by now. The freighter was built for long distance journeys; it could've continued on it's course for months before it needed to refuel.

Laeonas was not a machine, however; he couldn't operate at the same level when freshly fed compared to weeks after he'd last tasted real food. His mind continued to spiral into grief-- and he found himself here, staring at an inanimate blade he'd taken from a woman that he'd left for dead.


"You were stronger," He'd mutter, almost to inaudible to hear. "'Ow many times did ya save me? From those Nexu, from that droideka?" The boy continued, leaning forward. The blade only answered with a hum; and he sank further into despair as his questions continued to be unanswered.

"Ai don't understand 'ow Ai'm alive, Ai don't understand why Ai wasn't tha one who got left there. 'Ow many 'ave Ai put in tha ground or left dead?" He further asked, genuinely unsure. He'd never stayed behind whenever he'd speed by on a speeder and open fire on a group of gangsters who wore a different color, and only once had he checked to see if someone he'd beaten until they couldn't stand needed help. At the minimum, he was probably responsible for half a dozen deaths.

He couldn't know the maximum.


"But... but you... ya were a monster." Laeonas suddenly stated, clutching the hilt tight to his chest. "Ya would've left me, no ifs. You... ya... yer..." He tried to sputter out, but he couldn't.

"...Ai wouldn't be 'ere if ya'adn't done what ya did." He finally finished. The lightsaber switched off, and he sighed.

He looked across the room, seeing the pile of bars he'd left untouched for days.

This was his ship now. The lightsaber in his hand was his. The beskar across the room would make him rich-- or untouchable.

But as he closed his eyes... she was still there.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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Somewhere in the void of space,
Two Weeks
following Laeonas' Escape
From Mataou




Laeonas hadn't eaten spoiled food in years. Despite the lack of refrigeration on Dantooine, he'd never had a problem with storing the food he had gotten his hands on... because he'd eaten all available hours after getting his hands on it.

Now, however, Laeonas couldn't help but grimace as he swallowed the stale bits of grain in the ration pack he'd opened.

He refused to eat the food that was explicitly rotten, or covered in mold; he hadn't escaped Mataou just so he could die of botulism on some freighter in the void of space. Still, he found it necessary to eat something to keep him alive. Even if it wasn't adequate to sate his needs, the boy was able to ease the growing hunger pangs by consuming the stale wafers in the ration packs. Combined with the meditative trance, he could probably extend the time it would take for him to finally die by a number of weeks.

The boy had begun to do something... else with his time. Rather than idly hold the lightsaber, he'd actually started practicing with the energy based weapon.

He was used to the momentum of the small amount of weight in his blade helping to add power to his strikes. Laeonas had always used momentum to his advantage in close combat, but if he was going to start using a lightsaber, he had to change how he fought with melee weapons entirely.

Strikes would go farther, and the plasma blade would obviously cut far more effectively, but the boy constantly found himself in obviously vulnerable positions which skilled opponents could probably exploit.

Focusing on training with the new weapon was therefore less based off a (previously) great desire to become proficient with something so infamously feared, and more so to do with survival-- both in the long term, and the short term.

Training required focus-- a very, very high amount of focus. Dedicating time to the mastering the new weapon would leave his mind occupied... and increasingly, it became easier and easier to concentrate.

That was until he'd noticed the composition of his new weapon.

--------

It had been after an hour of practice. He was sweating, and the boy's increasingly thin frame was soaked in it. Dropping the blade, he'd collapse in a huff, before he'd slowly try to pull himself up again.

It was when he stood that he noticed the lightsaber wasn't in his hand, so turning, he'd see that it had rolled a meter away. Closing the distance, the boy reached down to pick it up.

That was the point when he'd register it.

As his hand wrapped around the grip, the boy noticed the color of the leather; and further, the texture was...

"No way," He mumbled, grip releasing from around the hilt as he looked down into his palms. Fingers trembling, both hands slowly pressed together-- and his eyes fell back on the weapon, with a gaze that could only be described as feral.

He kicked at it first. The metal clattered across the room, and he pursued. Snarling, he'd scoop it up; and than he'd dig his fingernails into the grip the same he had done when he tore into the freshly cooked flesh of the kath hounds he'd fed on while on Dantooine.

He breathed quickly, hyperventilating while tears poured down from his eyes. His teeth were clenched together as he rubbed his nails raw trying to tear through the grip. Eyes bulged bloodshot out of Laeonas' sockets as he continued, and his emotions ran wild.

The images of the Sith had changed; no longer was she lying on the ground and left to die. Laeonas was beside her-- beating the very life from her body himself.

Bruises from his fists were as extensive as the electrical burns. Scratch marks were on her neck, which was twisted at an odd angle, snapped by the raging beast that had been Laeonas Tannaras.

The blastss rained down, but he didn't stop. The stone and slag buried it, and it's body was consumed besides the Sith.

But it was still alive; screaming, crushed. There was no desire to escape, however.

Only the desire to destroy the Sith woman.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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Somewhere in the Void of Space.

He was going to die out here.

He'd stopped the meditative trance. He simply layed curled on the floor of the refresher for the past day, rocking a bit and whispering to himself.

The cargo hold had suffered some damage, and so had the lightsaber; parts of the external frame had been chipped off, exposing the power cell and much of the wiring inside, while the grip had been shredded off, replaced by blank durasteel beneath.

What Laeonas had experienced, he now realized, was the dark side-- the wrong, in all it's terrible power. He'd given into raw emotion, and it made him sick-- not because of what he'd done, but because of how he felt.

He'd felt powerful-- like he couldn't be stopped. He was a force of nature that existed to destroy-- to end life, burning away all that was and leaving nothing behind-- besides corpses and rubble.

They should've both died. They should've been consumed by Mataou. They both deserved it; she was devoid of all empathy or shame, and she dolled out suffering because it pleased her.

His crimes couldn't measure up to someone who felt peeling the skin off of men and using it as a grip for a weapon was justified though. Laeonas was responsible for deaths-- but every one of the people he had killed was in an act of self defense, or he had been left in a position where maintaining their lives would've resulted in the end of his own.

No. This man-- boy, even if he was going on 27 years old-- wasn't a mass murdering psychopath... but increasingly, Laeonas began to believe he was capable of becoming one.

It had been so easy to leave the Sith to die, but what had frightened him was how easy it was to justify it. To write her off as weak, deserving of her fate for making a mistake that, had he been the one with the ligthsaber, he would've made as well. His mind was conditioning itself to avoid blame. The fact that he had failed so badly in stopping the guilt from overwhelming all he did was a good sign that he was far, far away from becoming a callous killer-- but there was a chance, and a growing one at that.

Hate, anger, desire, passions; from the brief bits of information he'd gleaned from his presence on Ossus, these were the emotions that led people to embrace the dark side. They'd allow their desires and ambitions to blind them to the horrible acts they committed. Or they'd be overwhelmed by emotions; perhaps their desire to punish wrongdoers would grow so furious that they would slaughter them, and soon the dark side would get it's hold around them.

And what was Laeonas, if not a passionate, emotionally volatile man? He was driven by lofty goals and ambitions, and his actions were often dictated by his feelings as often as his thoughts. It didn't matter if he was constantly disgusted by the wrong he'd feel whenever he gave into his emotions, or felt himself slipping into justifications for robbing or beating people; some of the most moral, kind Jedi masters in history had held their morals close to their hearts, and they had still fallen to the dark side.

It was better this way. Better for him to waste away on this ship. It would probably be found adrift, months down the line. If he was lucky, whoever found him might try to determine who he was. That way his personal wealth could be put to better use, or better yet, transferred home.


"Home." He'd think, lips parting open and speaking the word, but no sound escaping.

Run down tenaments. Broken streetlights. Whores on street corners, gangs in the alleyways. Drug dealers harassing him as he passed, speeders throwing trash at him while they whizzed by. Law enforcement demanding protection fees, and beating him when he refused.

And his mother.

His mother, who'd spent years trying to convince him to use what he had to live better. His mother, who'd gone without meals to pay for rent. His mother, who'd move whenever he had His mother, who'd encouraged him to abandon a life of criminality every single week, only for him to blow her off or loudly curse at her-- which would be followed by her hitting him with a spoon.


"Fly high, little raven. Fly high, little prince." The words of that short lullaby she'd sing to him when he was little were burned into his mind. She had never told him where she'd gotten the song from; he'd suspected that she'd simply remembered it from her own mother, or that she might've made it up, or that it might've just been a fairly common nursery song.


But it had always brought a smile to his lips. The black haired boy would imagine himself flying over the clouds, above the filth of the cities beneath him. Through the icy polar regions in the North and the South of his world, across the arid salt flats that covered most of the world. Further, Laeonas could imagine himself flying higher and higher into the blackened night sky-- and he'd imagine the stars.

In the major cities of his world the stars were left invisible-- but it had only been the times when he and his mother had moved to the other metropolis' of his world, in the hours of night between them, that he'd managed to see the extent of the night's beauty. An ocean of vast, twinkling lights, outstretched before him. The moving lights of ships were also present-- whizzing past his eyes, as bright as the stationary stars in the sky.

His eyes were aquamarine jewels on a milky pink field. Veins red and blue tore across, but the bright aquamarines shimmered as they shifted to look down at his shaking, ever thinning body. His lips were dry, and it ached to even move his jaw. It hurt when he began to stand, when his arm reached up, and his fingers wrapped around the basin of the refresher. Sound still couldn't escape his mouth, but he would've groaned in pain as cramped muscles moved for the first time in hours.

The door slid open, and he stumbled out. He'd press against the wall and move slowly to the cockpit, inaudibly groaning as waves of pain ran through his stiff muscles. Sitting down in the pilot's seat, his eyes darted to the galaxy map-- and to the nearest inhabited system that he knew wasn't explicitly aligned against the people who properly owned his ship.

Bespin.

Over the previous weeks, he'd narrowed down the controls on the ship to figure out their functions. He could guess the process needed to reach Bespin, both based off the relatively simple controls, and the times he had watched captains act in the past. Laeonas rubbed his eyes as his trembling fingers typed in the coordinates, and turned the ship. Finally, his hand wrapped around the traditional handle for the hyperdrive, and punched it forward.

Laeonas couldn't die on this ship. Not yet. He was going to give everything he'd earned, everything he was-- back to the woman who'd tried so hard to make him a better man that he could ever hope to be. He owed it to his mother to see her one final time.

Tears streamed down the boy's face. He'd manage to croak as he'd begin sobbing, his worn fingers pulling at his hair.

He had to get home; but before he could get home, he had to get to Bespin.



 

Laeonas Tannaras

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The Bespin System,
Two Weeks
following Laeonas' Escape
From Mataou




Certain features or adjectives came to Laeonas' mind whenever he pictured the idea of a "planet" in his mind. While Laeonas had spent most of his life in cities, scurrying through apartments and alleyways with pavement and metal almost always beneath his feet, the boy also recognized that such a foundation was built on something; ground. The boy wasn't familiar with the physics behind the formation of worlds, but if gravity was anything to go on, he figured that a planet had to be... dense?

What he saw from orbit when he dropped out of hyperspace was something else entirely.

Ground; the foundation upon which everything he'd ever stood on when not in transit between worlds, was absent on this world. Rather than a dense ball of rock Bespin was a gas giant, but not just any odd clump of gas in the middle of space; it was a world people chose to live on. The Outer Rim World was host to a number of floating cities and colonies that primarily thrived off the harvest of Tabana Gases. Prosperous, and independent from the reach of broader galactic authorities, and the hutts.

Entering the atmosphere, the boy's large freighter was soon flanked on either side by two small craft.

"You aren't scheduled for landing, and you aren't cleared. Depart immediately." Was the first thing they'd told him when he'd finally answered their hails through the comm channels.

"Mae supplies are danger'ously low; Ai've got credits, Ai'll pay whatever fees ya want, and Ai'll work off anythin' else." Laeonas replied, far to tired, hungry, and emotionally as well as psychologically spent to argue or even lie convincingly. His voice was barely audible; a raspy croak, which combined with his accent would've been completely incomprehensible if he wasn't making an active attempt to enunciate.

There wasn't an immediate reply, but he picked up the faintest mention of a
"What the kark was that accent..." right before the line cut. Laeonas' fingers gripped tightly around the controls as he prepared to take evasive action; but luckily, it wasn't needed.

"Emergency landings are permitted with the understanding of compensation for the loss of use of a p--" The voice began, before the boy abruptly replied with an "Ai'll pay whatever kriffin' fees ya want, just let me land this hunk of shite!"

"...follow our instructions and directions to the landing pad." Another voice would say, before both pods would turn and fly off in another direction. Breathing a sigh of relief, Laeonas followed close behind.

Landing the ship was a bit awkward; it was a first time experience for the boy, but he managed to pull it off.

Here he was, on a city of clouds. Home he'd soon be; and he'd see his mother again, for the first time in eight years.

He hoped.



 
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