Chapter Text
It was dark that night. His quarters had a sort of weight to them, heavy with the summer, dripping with humidity. Quiet the space. Quiet her breathing. He might recall to someone else- if he ever had an occasion, or the permission, to recall a private memory like that -that during this time, her Master had put undue strain on her. There was some sort of internal dispute then, one he didn’t and wouldn’t ever know the specifics of and so: He had no idea if that factored in when she sat up, hand braced against his sternum.
“I’m not what you think I am, Alek,” she said, the movement of her lips an implication in the dark.
She’d had a name then and he’d said it and her fingernails dragged through the thin layer of sweat on his skin, gouging furrows of detritus under her nails. The whites of her teeth flashed gray, hair falling all about and into her face. Only three years older than him. She must have been all of sixteen and half his size.
He couldn’t have told what he said beside her name, or perhaps he hadn’t because her lips had curled when he’d said it and he hadn’t known why and maybe he’d just… stopped. But what she said next was, “You only think you know me. You only think you know what I am because you have some carnal knowledge but that’s as meaningless as everything else we do alone when no one’s looking.”
Maybe that had hurt him. Maybe it had stung. He couldn’t remember how the words felt as they snapped across his face. But he could tell you about her. The hair in her face, dark and ominous plastered to her forehead and her cheeks; the wildness of her eyes, how her nose curled with her lips. He could tell you she was fearsome and magnanimous in that quiet moment after hushed movements had stilled.
“You know nothing of me,” she said. “You are a man deceived.”
Alek had not been a man yet. He had not been anything yet. Neither of them had. They’d still been children and at that time he’d had no idea what she meant.
They were nebulous words. “You know nothing of me,” it was a simple statement. At the time, he had simply accepted it. It was a common wisdom in the temple, a common meditation. Sit in stillness now, child, and think of how little you know. Perhaps, the statement simply had not seemed strange to him.
Revan knows when his thoughts dwell on these things. Revan can sense it. The slit of that formidable mask will catch onto him, and he’ll feel the eyes boring through his skin. Revan is not sentimental. He hates reminders of the past.
She had too. Soft as many of the moments passed between them might have been, she was not keen to hold their memories close. Instead, the whole world had been about next times and retries. She had never given up on anything so far as he knew it.
Revan, on the other hand, gave up on her.
Malak might have told a friend, if he’d ever had that sort of friend, that they’d been in the dusk of their training when she finally spoke on the issue again. Twenty-two years old and not a centimeter taller than she’d been the last time it came up. This erroneous topic.
She sat on the edge of the couch, half-way into her clothes, said it as she separated her tunics.
“I’m a lesbian.”
At first, he wasn’t sure if he’d heard her correctly. The question as he’d asked it had been, “What?” and it had come out with all the expected incredulity that a statement like hers might imply. Especially in the context which she chose to imply it. Right after they’d-
Her eyes were hard when she turned on him, half illuminated in the yellow light, black and gold and angry.
“You heard me,” she said.
“I heard you, but I fail to comprehend, considering,” here he gestured at his own naked body, at her, still shrugging her tunic back on over her shoulders, at the mussed sheets.
Her expression managed to solidify further, from anger to fury. “And what is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
“That you fuck men!” he said. “Lesbians don’t fuck men!”
She looked him over, lips thinned around an indignant smile. “A man?” she asked. “I only see a boy.”
The ventilation speaks in sweet whispers. Cold air and cold water and the trickling sound of a long dead voice. It’s cold in Space. Malak remembers the first time he’d learned that. As he was dragged away from his home. He had not known her then. He had not even known she existed. He had felt empty and alone.
Sometimes, when they are- when they are alone- Revan speaks in the same whispers as the cold lips of that girl. Malak isn’t allowed to talk about that. Isn’t supposed to think about it. Malak quiets his mind and Revan’s hands are every bit as tiny as hers were against his palms.
Others are haunted by the dead. Malak is haunted by the living.
Revan has no face. Revan has no name. Revan is a title. It means, “return.” It means, “unholy body.” It means, “animate death.”
They both know the truth. The whispers in the ventilation know the truth. Revan, turning Malak’s broken thoughts over and over, knows the truth.
He had told her he wasn’t a boy. He was nineteen and three years a man at least but she’d only laughed. She loved to laugh at him. He had been a common butt to jokes. She’d had a sense of humor. Every bit as cruel and cutting as her eyes, every bit as harsh as her tongue. Sharp and pointed and vicious.
She had been dying a slow death, an internal death, longer than any of them had ever known. It was terminal. And whatever it was, it had won.
“A general isn’t a woman,” she had told him. They were two years into the war. Struggling hard. Her clothing had been getting heavier and heavier with age. More and more layers piled one on top of the other until she was nothing beneath them.
Malak was amused. “Oh and what pray tell is she then?” he asked.
“She is nothing,” she said. “I am not her.”
She looked at him, those eyes stonier than they’d ever been all their life. “I am your general.” This was a simple statement. This was a simple wisdom. One they had all been raised with. They were Jedi first and human second.
“You will not call me that name,” she said. “It is no one’s name any longer. It has fallen out of relevance. That person you knew is dead.”
Malak nodded his head. What he said was, “Yes, Sir.”
There is blood on the floor. His own teeth are staring at him, dancing against his knees. And the discomprehension. It should be his head staring back at his body. Not his teeth. There is blood on the floor. There is blood on his robes. Revan stands before him, impassive, hidden beneath wefts of fabric and that unfeeling mask. There is blood on the mask.
It makes a wet thunking sound. It does not stop making that sound. The blade flashes and his jaw drops and it does not stop dropping. That wet sound, the feeling of the blood come out of it like a dropped cup, repeats ad nauseum. Malak feels ill. Malak is not bleeding. His own severed jaw is.
He would ask why but all that comes from him is a moist, garbled shout.
Revan’s blade disappears into the hilt, returned to his belt. Returned to its neutral position.
Malak wants to ask why. He still cannot speak. Maybe he never will again. His hand trembles as he reaches up to his face. He knows the truth, but he cannot fathom it. He knows the truth, but it cannot be. It isn’t until the weight of his tongue lands on the back of his wrist unrestricted.
‘Why?’ he wants to demand, “Didn’t you kill me?”
Revan’s mind is like a solid wall of sheet metal. Revan stands silent. Then, his general turns away.
“Clean up your mess, Malak,” he is ordered. And then he is alone.
She had cared for him once. She had cared. Malak tells himself this. He lays on the gurney and he insists it.
When they had both been children, new to the enclave, she had been the one to stop his crying. She had been the one to dry his eyes. “We could keep together,” she’d said and they had. For so long they had.
The wound becomes infected. It festers. The medical droids open the burns to let the puss. Drains are installed to keep him from aspirating his own blood. He still cannot understand why. He still cannot even ask.
Revan stands over him, cradles the little drainage bags in his hand the way she once might have cradled him when they were small.
Malak cannot even glare. He cannot move his face for fear of the pain which has finally set in.
“Don’t look so upset,” Revan says. “I’ve been merciful, haven’t I?”
Malak disagrees. His general has shown more weakness than mercy but he cannot say this. He cannot address the little figure before him. The living cannot speak to the dead. Revan is a corpse and Malak has now lost the ability to speak to anyone.
“Don’t tell me you’re angry,” Revan says.
Malak tries to look at anything but this intrusion. He would prefer to be left in the loneliness and boredom of convalescence without such interruptions.
“It’s not so bad,” Revan tells him.
The general’s fingers hover above the bandages the droids wrapped around Malak’s bare neck. Revan does not know that the droids have to mist his tongue and throat every hour to avoid the membranes splitting and bleeding. Malak doesn’t tell him. Malak can’t.
“We have always been close, haven’t we Malak?” Revan asks in her voice. It’s a stolen voice. Just as the devotion Malak feels to this monster is a stolen devotion.
Revan should have killed Malak the way he killed her.
“Try not to hold a grudge.” Revan tells him.
Gloved fingers trace Malak’s sternum. A leather clad palm cups what little is left of his cheek. When the mask comes away, the face is just as stolen as the voice. Hair falling all about and into it.
Malak might be the one lying on the gurney, but the man he sees above him is nothing but the vacant body of a girl he once loved. And after so long, Malak realizes, it seems time she be laid to rest.