Saga Choices

Title: Choices​

Author: LuminaraFan4Evr​

Characters: OCs (unnamed Jedi and Padawan)​

Timeframe: Clone Wars​

Genre: Angst/Vig​

Summary: A Jedi Knight mourns his loss.​

Notes: I'm several years out of practice, and hoping I've still got it. With that in mind, please be gentle. Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars. If I did, I'd be able to quit my job.​

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It’s been 8 months, 2 weeks, and 11 hours since I fell to my knees in the dirt of a Force-forsaken planet in the middle of nowhere and watched as the life was ripped from her. Death is rarely a peaceful thing, despite the almost romantic way it’s portrayed in the holo-films these days, and when it comes the way hers did, it’s something you’d pay to have pried out of your skull, just so you could escape the memories. I don’t have that kind of credit to my name, so I’ve watched it on an endless, horrifying loop for the last several thousand hours, this beautiful girl gasping and choking and slowly suffocating on her own blood.

She was the first Force-sensitive child I discovered, the first of dozens I condemned to a life just like my own – a life with no possessions, no relationships, and later, nothing but war. I was nineteen when I met her, a wide-eyed, innocent six-month-old – completely normal, save for her latent telekinetic abilities. Later I would meet parents who considered their Force-sensitive children to be aberrations, parents who were frightened by their child’s abilities and believed them to be possessed by demons. It was easy to rationalize taking these children. My first job was so much harder. Her parents cried and begged me not to take their only child away. I was young, and their cries haunted me. For years afterwards I would wake up in a cold sweat, remembering her father’s threat that if I allowed harm to come to his baby girl, he would kill me in a horrifyingly slow and agonizing way. After she died, I wished he really could hunt me down.

I held her hand and watched her gasp for breath, watched the light fade from her eyes and bleed out of her body from a dozen deep wounds, even one of which would have been fatal. As it was, those beasts had robbed her of any chance she had to die comfortably. Every second was torture, for both of us. The horror on her face increased a hundredfold as she realized what was happening, when her desperate gasps no longer brought oxygen into her lungs, but instead sent foamy red bubbling out of her mouth. I forced myself to watch it all unfold, to be there for her while she choked her way out of this world. It was the least I could do for her, though I know at the end she no longer recognized my presence, because everything that happened to her was my fault. I could have lied to the Masters, tell them the child failed the standard tests, that she was worthless. I could have saved her. I knew exactly what I was condemning her to, because I had lived that life myself. In the end, I took her because I was selfish. I could never have a daughter, and so because I was young and foolish, I promised myself to love her as if she were mine.

The horror of this fresh nightmare fades slightly, and I find myself drifting back into sleep, into one of the rare good dreams my psyche allows, in what I am convinced is merely a status quo to keep me slightly sane.


In this alternate reality, I hold this child’s future as surely as I hold her small body against my chest, and I make the right choice. I put her back into her parents’ arms, and I thank them for their time. I close their door, walk down their street, leave this planet and never return. In this alternate reality, I can watch her grow up. Five years old, and playing ball with her father instead of learning how to fight with a weapon as yet taller than she is. Twelve, and scribbling notes to her best friend instead of standing stoically at her funeral. Seventeen, with her date to the formal, instead of committing to memory the inner workings of a hundred different vehicles. And twenty, doing anything she wanted, when in my world, she was learning what it felt like to be expendable, what it felt like to die for a cause you had never believed in. In this alternate reality, she is free. This time, I save her.


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Thanks for taking the time to read! If you have a few extra seconds, please review as well

 

This is a lovely and sad vignette about the damage that comes from losing someone the master was sworn to protect. You've gone a very long way to aptly prove that lack of attachment was a constant struggle for any master, especially when it came to their padawans. Very excellent work.

 

How heartbreaking are the alternate reality dreams... well the whole thing is heartbreaking.

But I also can't imagine living over and over the terrible death she had, so as heartbreaking as it is to know the AR dreams aren't real, perhapse they give some sanity to the narrator.

I'm usually not a very big fan of first person POV, but I think this story it was a good choice. It really pulled us into the emotion of it all.

Great job!

 

A lot of survivor's guilt in that story - and the dream of an alternate reality that may never have been, but seems idyllic. Choices, consequences, and possibilities all interplay. Sad, but wonderful storytelling.