Chapter Text
“I don’t understand what Caleb was on about back there.” Jisung grumbles, swinging his arms back and forth so furiously that he nearly smacks Seungmin in the face. Seungmin dodges with a sigh, but the close call leaves Jisung unfazed as he continues. “Why would they ever use the beacon to tell Jedi to run? Jedi don’t run from anything! We stand and fight for what we believe in!”
Seungmin pauses, a shrouded silhouette with the endless hallway behind him. A light sparks above them as Jisung turns to look, meeting Seungmin’s expressionless gaze. The constant little knot of dread in his stomach grows larger the longer he looks at Seungmin’s blank face. He’s never looked like that, pale and distraught and wrong. “Don’t you remember?” Seungmin whispers, unsure, and Jisung freezes because he’s never seen Seungmin be unsure of anything.
They’ve stopped just in front of the training room, and his master waits patiently for him in the doorway. He bows to her, and suddenly Seungmin is gone from his side. Weird, Jisung thinks. Maybe he has training with Master Wonpil, but Jisung should be able to see his retreating back somewhere down the lengthy hallways if he did. No, he’s simply vanished, like he’s disappeared into thin air.
Jisung doesn’t have time to look for him, not when Master Thassa is pulling him into the empty training room by his elbow.
“It is time for your instruction, young Padawan.” Her voice is flat in his ear, and her hand holds his elbow an unyielding grip that he’s sure will bruise. She only drops her grip when he flinches.
When she rounds on him, green lightsaber at the ready and face devoid of features, he pales, stepping back in terror until his feet catch on each other and send him to the training room floor. Suddenly, everything is wrong. He chokes, throat seizing on nothing as his hands tremble against the cold floor.
Her lightsaber was blue, he thinks, but now he’s not sure. He hasn’t been sure of anything in a while.
“Get up,” she shrilly demands of him, but he knows she’d never say that. Not to him. Thassa was always so gentle, so kind. She would guide him through meditations when his anxiety spiked, and she’d thrown little parties when he passed his trials. Her hands were soft and careful, just like her voice.
She cared for him enough to-
When he blinks, he’s back on Felucia, surrounded by Clone Troopers and exotic plants and blaster fire. The humid, suffocating jungle heat sears his skin off, and his standard issue boots sink in the mud. It stinks of rotten foliage and gasoline and death so much that his nose crinkles painfully. He takes a moment to watch the planet swallow him whole and, when he looks up, a Pantoran woman with blue skin smiles at him. But it’s not Thassa, his master, because her yellow tattoos are wrong and her smile is dangerous.
Another blink. Her face melts away in the heat, and her body collapses onto the jungle floor, riddled with blaster marks from their own troops.
He doesn’t remember much, but he’ll never forget the way the force had folded in on him and ripped his heart from his chest that day.
He doesn’t remember much, but the dying scream of his master is forever etched in blood on the inside of his ears.
He tried so hard to forget, but he is nothing but a coward in the end.
A Jedi Knight might’ve fought to their dying breath, but he is no Jedi. Not anymore.
He wakes up on his floor to uneven metal panels digging into his left hip and his kyber crystal cold against his shoulder where his necklace had rode up while he slept. The room is dark and dank, typical dorm housing for a Lantillian factory worker like Jisung. He begins to pull himself to his feet, swallowing down bile and tripping over musty sheets that had tangled around his legs when he’d fallen to the floor last night. Bracing himself against the bed, he pulls his sheets away and lets the world swirl around him.
His room resounds with heavy knocks as the voice of his Rodian coworker, Kroff, rings out. “Peter, you’re going to be late again if you don’t wake up.” Jisung rolls his eyes, shuffling over to the little sink that sits carved into the wall. He turns it on, splashing a bit of cold water over his eyes before running wet hands through his hair to brush it back. He’s still dressed in work clothes, a blue shirt, stained with battery acid and engine oil, and brown pants that are equally as soiled. He must’ve passed out immediately last night, because his boots are still laced tight around his shins. The kyber necklace is hidden deep beneath his buttoned collar - a cold, heavy, dead weight against his chest.
He thumbs at it for comfort as he stares.
The person in the mirror is an enigma, all sunken cheeks and tired eyes instead of the bright eyed Padawan he once was, full of mirth and joy and life and trust in the force. That naive era of his life is over, and all he sees now is just a tired, terrified, lonely twenty-year-old Lantillian factory worker who’s trying his best to stay under the Empire’s radar.
He’s spent years avoiding detection, but hiding in plain sight comes with a price. Somewhere in between the mask of gray cheeks and the lifeless eyes is the real Jisung, but he’s not quite sure where the mask ends and the real him starts. He’s terrified of the day when he doesn’t quite recognize himself anymore.
His hair is starting to get too long, he notes, picking at the bangs that cover his eyes. He’ll have to ask Gulgi to cut it for him. She did a good job last time, even if she was a little too chatty for his tastes.
Kroff knocks on the door again, agitated, and Jisung sighs, resting his forehead on the metal lip of the sink. “I’m coming,” he croaks, fumbling around to turn off the tap.
He hears Kroff scoff from the hallway, no doubt rolling his eyes. “Make it quick, or I won’t keep saving food for you.” Jisung squeezes his eyes shut, biting back a painful headache as he stands to his full height.
His safety gloves are hanging by the door on a hook meant for coats. Stepping forward, he reaches for them, fully intending to grab them on his way out, but something small and insistent wells inside him as the gloves fly into his hands from over three feet away. Jisung gasps, dropping them like they’d burned him instead.
The force isn’t something you can turn off, he’d known that. The Jedi had known that, and they’d trained him anyway.
It doesn’t listen to him the way it used to, popping up whenever it desires. It doesn’t care about his safety or his needs, simply revealing itself despite Jisung’s attempts to stifle it. He’d tried to lock it away early, but it always comes limping back - like a scorned pet deadset on making Jisung’s life hell. His training ensures that the force is a constant meddling power that puts him in danger, that brands him a traitor to the government, and he’ll never be able to stamp it out. At the end of the road, it will be the cause of his death. Of that, he is certain.
And that’s deeper than I wanted to go on a workday, Jisung thinks as he stares at the gloves on his floor. He swallows, throat itchy where the leather of his necklace digs in, as he snatches the gloves off the floor to hook them around his belt.
He’s glad he never took his boots off last night.
