Chapter Text
Dust dissolves into my sweat, dripping down like oozing blood. Red. Everything is red. The dry dirt kicked up beneath my feet, red. Screaming behind my eyes, flashes of Geonosis. All of those dreams I’ve had the last 20 years have led me here. I have been led here to dig.
My strength is waning as I drag another limp body from the rubble. I’d learned my lesson with the first few and now I peel off as much of the once white shiny armor as I could. The red and bloody plates I leave behind made them barely any lighter. I am not a small person: I can carry a lot, but now before me lay 104 identical men, alive, albeit barely. A few were conscious. More hands are on their way. My own fingers bled and dripped, mingling with the red of the earth under my feet.
“Please.”
I turn quickly at the sound. The outstretched hand of a man I had dragged above ground just minutes ago holds his gloves out to me.
“I… I can’t help you pull my brothers out, but please, at least wear these.”
The eyes of a dead man stare up imploringly. He is one of the few conscious, though unable to walk, he already began caring for the injured men around him that he could reach. I knew these men. Not their faces or souls, but I knew their suffering, I had seen it all my life. The dreams of cries for help and the pain, oh I had felt their pain. Bile rose in my throat as the screams in my head subsided. They were dying under the clay. I was failing.
The gloves are too big and my hands feel clumsy as I pull at stones. Bug-like eyes glare at me in the dark, the Geonosians as displeased by my presence as I am by theirs. Something in the Force tells me they will leave me be, for a time at least, they had their own wounds to lick. Down I go, pulled by the tides of the Force towards the cries that had haunted me all my life.
“I keep having dreams of red dust, and screams, so many screams I don’t know what to do anymore and I can’t think or breathe.” I knelt on the floor before my teacher and friend Desali.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to help. I want to stop it.”
“Okay then, do that,” Desali turned from the window towards me, sunlight hitting half of her gentle aged face. “Find what is causing these dreams, this pain. Put an end to it.”
“I’m not a fighter, I’d make a terrible Jedi, I can't win wars. The events in my dream are a war, a terrible one. I know nothing about that.”
“You aren’t a Jedi? Why do you hold their ideals and abilities so highly?”
“They act! They go out and do things! Because of their rules against attachment they are able to freely defend the universe, which is what we should be doing.”
“They act yes, but who tells them to?”
“The Force.”
“No, they hear the Force most definitely, but they don’t always listen. The Jedi are the Republic, and they always have been. They were based in the Force but now they are extensions of an established government.”
“They do listen!”
“And how do you know that, girl?”
“I…”
“The Jedi forbid attachment, but it does not make them better. It doesn’t make them worse either. They simply are. The thing we force users must fear is an unwillingness to let go. If we cannot let go and move on we will find ourselves trapped in quicksand as it pulls us towards the dark side and out into the tides with no anchor.” Desali had moved closer to me now, she held my chin between her thumb and index finger. “If the solution to the dreams is unattainable, if you fail or cannot do it, will you be able to walk away? Accept defeat? Will you let go, Stell? Or will it swallow you whole?”
“Hold onto me!” My strength has long since abandoned me, the limp nearly dead bodies never ending. I have counted 572 of them. My people responded to my call, and my brothers and sisters are here to aid. For 3 days we have pulled men from the red earth, but the cries are dying out. As quickly as we save one I feel another slip away to the tides.
“Come on we’ve got this.” I pull the barely conscious man closer to my chest, I will not let his life slip away before it has started. I won’t let go.
“I’ll let go if I must, but not until I’ve searched the universe for answers.”
Desali’s wrinkled face warped into a smile. “Your attachment and love make you shine all the brighter, Stell. Don’t try to be something you are not, let go of this pedestal you’ve put the Jedi on and move forward, they’re beings just as you and I are.” Desali sat across from me, her elbow rested in her knee. “Now back to your dreams my love. What else is in them?”
“I often see a planet of rain and thunder.”
Rolling thunder tore across the sky, and I found myself soaked to the bone as I attempted to pry open the blast door before me.
“For kriffs sake I swear to the maker if you do not open right now I’LL-” and suddenly I heard something crack in the door. “Another yank and it’ll…”
The door opened to sterile white walls and the smell of antiseptic. I went to close the door behind me and I shook off what water I could. No one knew I was there, and a puddle trail behind me would surely let them know. After a moment of deliberation, I threw my cloak out the door and into that never ending ocean.
“I’ll get another once I’m home. Desali is going to give me a scolding though.” And off I crept down the blinding white hall before me.
Tubes full of boys, identical children all in various stages of growth.
I dropped from the vent I had been crawling through and into an office. It seemed important. I had been hiding in those walls nearly four full days trying to connect the dots and gather my thoughts. That place frightened me. It was not a place of comfort or safety. It reminded me of when my friend Oda died years ago. The mothers and fathers prepared the funeral with such a rigid and formal approach. Sterile and long past the state of mourning, as if those walls were already preparing bodies for their funerals. I pulled the data stick from the terminal as I felt one of those beings--Kaminoans as I’d learned in my three day stay--began swaying and gliding towards the office. I had already paid a visit to the offices of Ko Sai and Lama Su. This would be my final day.
These were the soldiers, and the war in my mind was theirs, it was theirs only because it would be forced on them.
“This war is going to happen. I know who is fighting it now, but I don’t know why.” Defeated once again, I was on my knees before my teacher Desali.
“What else?”
“What else? What do you mean, what else? I have no other clues!”
“What else, child?”
Angry and frustrated tears streamed down my face.
“I saw them all, they’re doomed to fight a war with no purpose. Honorable men forced to fight and die in a sham war.”
“No one is doomed, my love.”
Blood, sweat and tears coat my body under a thick layer of red dust. Just over 1,000 men. The screams here have stopped. What’s done is done. The cries in my head carry on. Many of the same voices screaming in harmony, but as the cries of Geonosis quiet, other voices rise to the surface.
“I loved you.”
“You must run! CALEB!”
“You were my brother!”
“Yes, lord Sidious”
“I loved you!”
“Find him, Fives. FIND HIM.”
My head throbs as blaster fire mingles with the familiar zing of a lightsaber. Fives, I pulled two Fives from the earth myself just today. Was it a name? Was one of them the answer?
I knelt, thinking. The earth beneath me was cool and damp. The grass coated in a layer of morning dew. I would think until it was time, I am patient and I can wait.
“Estell! Get back here Estell Vau or so help me!!!” A mother chased her young daughter as she ran towards the ship dock.
“He’s coming to visit soon right mommy you said he would! A ship just landed, it could be him!”
“He… he’s fighting my darling, he’s quite busy.”
“He’s fighting a war to help people right?” A small voice exclaimed, entranced by the idea of heroism and fighting to save others. Childlike gentle ideals, ideals her father did not share.
“He is fighting, whether it’s to help people or not I do not know.” The mother sank to the earth. Her daughter was both satiated and more curious than ever as she approached her hunched figure.
“Whose war is it?”
“I don’t know.” A sigh breezed past her lips as realization sank in.
“Why is he fighting if not to help people?” she asked with innocent hopeful eyes.
It took all of her strength to not tell her baby the truth. He fought for money, not honor.
“Stell Vau.” I hold my dirty bloody and grimy hand to the man I was kneeling beside, and offer him back his gloves.
“Taler.” He shakes my hand firmly. His leg is busted but otherwise he seemed to be in decent shape. He had been moving about our temporary camp helping to aid his injured brothers in arms. “My brother Jay is…” he looks to the next camp over. The bodies, the men we had pulled out alive but did not have the strength to make it the rest of the way, the tides have them now.
“May the waters of death treat him gently,” I say quietly but filled with conviction.
“Yeah, that.” Hollow eyes follow the movements of my brothers and sisters as they build a pyre.
“Is it offensive to you? We will not put him on the pyre if that isn’t the desire of his family.” Concern laces my voice. “I… we… they deserve better than to be left, but we cannot transport them all. The living take precedence.”
“No, no that isn’t… I saw you asked around before deciding to burn the dead. I’m not offended, I’m just…” his eyes cloud over once more.
“Sad?”
“We were confident, a squad of four. Strong. My two other brothers are likely still down there. I’m… I’m alone, I’ve never been alone before.”
“My friend Oda died when I was young. We used to go swimming together in the ocean. I remember burying him. I felt so empty and small.” I rise from the ground beside him. “I no longer feel empty and small, but it took time. You will have it. All the time you need. You all will. I’m sorry.” I bow to the sitting man and then turn and leave. He is mourning those he should have had a chance to love all his life.
But now he will love them alone.
The pyre burns red as my family sings for the lost boys to guide them down the river of death. Those who are loved are never lost.
“Their souls can rest; the flames will guide them as we honor their memory. They fought well and didn’t deserve to die.”
Taler watches the black smoke mix with the red sky of a setting sun. “The dead have no use for honor.”
The Geonosians had had enough of us. We would leave when the fire waned. We had overstayed our welcome.