Chapter Text
The Fourteenth Brother pants.
The Force whispers in his ear, vile and tempting, it’s easy to let it in, slick fingers of rot as it feeds on his anger. A bird cries, distant and in pain, but the jungle around them is silent. The air is hot and humid, weighing him down in the wake of the fight. The trees of Cularin’s forest tower over them, and the sunlight trickles through, dappling the undergrowth with light.
Rage boils inside him, it eats away at his control and the Force rises, angry and knife-sharp around him.
How could he?
The Fifteenth Brother is still on the ground, where the unknown Force-sensitive had pushed him. He looks shocked, for once, unnerved and off-balance. The Fourteenth Brother whips around, saber still lit, to loom over him.
Fear flows, icy, in his veins. They’re dead if the Master finds out about this. All of them are.
His lightsaber comes to rest at the Fifteenth Brother’s throat, the buzz of it loud in the silent heat of the unnaturally still jungle.
“You’re going to get us killed.” The Fourteenth Brother growls, his saber doesn’t waver, tip an inch from the Fifteenth Brother’s neck. “How could you?” He asks and his voice cracks.
How could he? As if he, himself, hadn’t done the same thing. Two Jedi, free, because the Fourteenth Brother was pulling his blows. Playing, teasing, as if that was still his right.
The Fifteenth Brother sneers at him, but doesn’t move, sitting stone still under his blade. There’s something heady about it, to have this man at his mercy. Resentment simmers under the Fourteenth Brother’s skin, controlled but impossible to ignore. The Force lashes around them.
“We are going to stay away from them.” The Fourteenth Brother snaps.
“Why?” the Fifteenth Brother sneers, “do you care about them?” He smirks, as if that is the worst of the Fourteenth Brother’s sins.
The anger boils in the Fourteenth Brother’s blood. “No,” he says, “but you do, don't you?” It’s cruel, he knows, and he also knows that for all his bluster, and all his bravado, the Fifteenth Brother had Fallen for his attachments, and of all of them, the Jedi who’d just met the hot end of the Fifteenth Brother’s lightsaber had always been his greatest weakness.
The Fourteenth Brother had Fallen for, well—he had Fallen for different reasons.
For all that the Fourteenth Brother hates him, he also knows him, and that almost makes it worse. He knows the Fifteenth Brother’s relationship with any report that could lead back to Thame, knows they never make it past his desk and up the chain of command. And, he knows, if the Fifteenth Brother didn’t want him to know, he wouldn’t.
Because, the familiar whispers of the possibility of an organized network of Force users never goes beyond whispers. It’s always just unfounded rumors and speculation, it’s clear the higher-ups don’t put much stake into the idea, but can’t completely forget it for fear of the fallout. And always, the Fourteenth Brother and the Fifteenth Brother, unimportant in the scheme of things, are assigned.
He knows, if he asked, the Fifteenth Brother would claim Thame is his to kill, that revenge for leaving him is his right. But the Fourteenth Brother also knows what it is to love in the Dark, and how it twists, and how it changes, until all that is left is the obsession, or until it fades away, eaten out as the Dark gorges itself.
“I care about myself. Lord Vader will kill us the second he thinks we could be compromised.” He continues.
The Fifteenth Brother purses his lips. They both know he’s correct though, and even the Fifteenth Brother, for all that his anger leads him, isn’t an idiot. If the Master knew, they’d already be dead, and it wouldn’t have been a quick death.
The air feels cold suddenly, the Fourteenth Brother steps back, lowering his saber. Its light flicks off, leaving his ears ringing in the absence of sound. He turns away without a word, making his way back through the tangle of undergrowth and towards the derelict temple. He steals a speeder, tucked away behind the falling apart building, and before he knows it, he’s back at the ship.
The stormtrooper guarding the ramp greets him with a sharp salute but he ignores it, pushing past, and the trooper steps out of the way quickly to avoid brushing against him. The humid air fades into the temperature-controlled air of a ship, artificially neutral and almost too cool after the heat of the jungle planet.
He takes off toward his bunk, and then the fresher, stripping quickly, sweat-wet cloth falling to the floor carelessly. Maybe, he thinks idly, the horrible reunion could be washed away, erased, under the pressure of a sonic shower.
His eyes haunt him, the brown of them, almost hazel in the Cularian forest’s green-tinged light, wide and hurt as he’d dodged the Fourteenth Brother’s swings. And the Fourteenth Brother had been so mad at him, almost blind with it.
Because how dare he show himself here on this backwater planet—when the Fourteenth Brother had been spending so much time trying to forget him, and how dare he not recognize him. And so the Fourteenth Brother had teased him with the intent to hurt, a horrid mockery of the hundreds of spars of their past.
Falling together to the sparring mat, a foot twisted around a knee to off-balance his opponent, brown eyes meeting brown eyes, brushing a strand of hair from his face and leaning in to—
No.
The Fourteenth Brother’s eyes had been wet by the time the Jedi escaped, hidden by his helmet, an unforgivable weakness and a disgrace to his Order.
The fear of it consumes his thoughts, unyielding, and he knows, fed by the Dark, whose fingers peel away his fears, feeding on them, and leaving him panting at the terror seeping in at the edges of his thoughts.
He chooses a water shower over a sonic despite the limited rations. In a fit of uncharacteristic self-indulgence, he uses his entire water rations for the rest of the week. It’s only a couple days, he can go without.
The water beats down on his back. He turns up the pressure until it almost hurts, the spray needle-sharp and numbing.
The memories rise, unbidden and violent. Sharp pain, lightning, cold metal, and mental fingers prying, peeling, stripping him raw. A violating mental presence, sick and dark, a prison. A cell, a chair, and throughout it all, the leeching Darkness and the fear of an inevitable Fall. Let me die. Let me die. Let me die. He’d begged, and begged, and begged and—
He scrubs until his skin blooms red beneath in his fingers, the light scent of a soap he’d picked up on an unnamed planet on the Outer Rim, incognito in a lively wet market, hunting, still burns his nose. There’d been a Jedi padawan there, no longer young, but just as terrified as they always were. The Fourteenth Brother hadn’t looked away when the Fifteenth Brother had lit his saber. The Force had bled sorrow, as a scream cut short and then—silence. Red splattered on the street, blending into the rust colored dust in a macabre camouflage.
He takes in a shaky breath.
The Fifteenth Brother’s presence bleeds back into the ship, a quasar of Dark, sticky with it and uninhibited. The ship seems to brace itself, as if preparing for a blow.
The Fourteenth Brother’s stomach turns.
The Dark whispers, you could end him, it says, take his place, the master would regard you, it croons.
He lets out the breath.
The ship rumbles as the pilots prepare for take-off.
The Fourteenth Brother dries himself mechanically, dresses, gray tactical and loose to obscure his form, and slips through the hallways of the ship like a ghost.
The Fifteenth Brother’s presence doesn’t diminish, looming throughout the ship, too large.
Back in his bunk, the Fourteenth Brother doesn’t sleep.
They don’t talk about it, but when the Fourteenth Brother emerges from his bunk, eyes gritty and body heavy, there’s a report on his desk. It makes no mention of encountering anyone of note at the Temple. An empty building, with evidence of a fleeing Force user. A fight with a local megafauna to explain the echoes of their battle, felt even back on the ship.
The Fourteenth Brother writes his own to match, no mention of them—him.
He checks over the reports and sends them in, heart pounding and sweat prickling the back of his neck, double, triple checking for mistakes, because any inconsistencies they’ll send it up the chain of command and then, well, that’s not allowed to happen.
He sends it off, back to command. Likely it won’t even get past the admin droid, another normal mission, a normal outcome, and an auto reply: search, pursue, don’t come back until you’ve done your job.
He bites at his thumbnail, chewing it to the quick, until the taste of iron bursts over his tongue and sticks in his throat, metallic and bitter. The pain is sharp and grounding.
An hour later and the expected reply comes.
The pull of the Fifteenth Brother’s Force signature places him in the training salle, and when the Fourteenth Brother arrives, he’s practicing lightsaber forms, stripped down, in only his regulation black trousers, and barefoot on the mat.
His Force presence, as usual, is nothing but barely suppressed rage. The Fifteenth Brother is breathing slightly too quickly, sweat streaked across his shoulders and his hair wet, stringy in his face. He doesn’t acknowledge the Fourteenth Brother as he enters to lean against the wall.
The Fourteenth Brother waits. He’s patient.
The Fifteenth Brother is not.
“What?” He snaps after barely a minute of silence, voice dripping with disdain, as he moves into a slow lunge. There’s a saber burn on his forearm, he hasn’t been to medical yet. Maybe he’s been at this all night.
“I sent the reports.” The Fourteenth Brother says.
The Fifteenth Brother quirks an unimpressed eyebrow, “And?”
“We’re supposed to pursue whoever used that Temple for shelter. Find them. Dispatch. Return to base.” He shifts, leaning all his weight onto one leg and twisting his other ankle out in front of himself to stretch. “The port dispatch says only one shuttle left this morning, headed for Daiyu. We can start there.”
The Fifteenth Brother wrinkles his nose in distaste. He doesn’t need to say that tracking down an unknown individual headed to Daiyu with no information is near impossible. That it’s a fool's errand to find anyone in the lawless urban world.
The Fifteenth Brother still doesn’t look at him though, limbs moving in smooth lightsaber forms, an echo of a trained Jedi and the evidence of Vader's Old Guard, the first of the Inquisitorius—a decade under the Sith.
Maybe, in another life, the Fourteenth Brother would have offered a spar, but he doesn’t, doesn’t want to. Doesn’t even want to look at the Fifteenth Brother on the worst of days and just wants away from him on the best of them.
He leaves without another word. The silence, like it always does between them, feels heavy.
Unbidden—there’s a familiar face on the other side of the bars of his cell. A gasp of Po's name, a horrid clinging hope, his throat burning, before yellow-gold eyes flash at him and the nasty curl of Po’s lips as he’d looked down at him.
“It’s inevitable Brother.” Po had said, lips curling around the word like it was the poison on his tongue, “don’t fight, the Dark isn’t so bad.” He’d tilted his head as he took in Dylan’s form, newly healed but blood-dirty and exhausted, kneeling on the duracrete floor.
The Darkness had twisted around him, vile and tempting, and Dylan had looked him in the eye and all he’d seen was his own inevitable future.
On the Fourteenth Brother’s worst days, he also remembers the War—a rare quiet night in the Jedi Temple, himself recovering from a battle wound, and Po newly returned from the front to give a rare in-person report to the Council. The Coruscanti moon high over the Temple gardens and Po settled down quietly beside him.
“Are you okay?” Po had asked, voice soft and kind, so kind, he was always so kind, and Dylan had sighed, only seventeen, and a soldier—a commander. Had met his eyes in the dusk light.
“Are any of us?” And Po had smiled, rueful and sad, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the moonlight. A cricket had chirped and the breeze had smelled of fuel. They’d sat there, comfortable in melancholy silence, and somehow Po had known that the quiet companionship of an old friend was exactly what he’d needed.
The Fourteenth Brother wonders, had he been Falling even then?
But he knows the answer.
There are constants in the Fourteenth Brother’s life: the Dark, and the Fifteenth Brother who used to be Po, his own violent Fall, and the fear, unending and inescapable, running through his veins.
Darth Vader’s silhouette looms over him in his mind's eye, watching with lightning on his fingers and his Force presence so overbearing that the Fourteenth Brother can barely breathe for the Darkness of it.
Maybe they’ll find the Force user, and the Fourteenth Brother, or the Fifteenth Brother, will dispatch it, as they have, dozens of them, and then they'll return to the Order, like they have dozens of times before, and if they’re lucky, no one will care to question them in person. Another mission assigned, another droid in another grey room, and another far off planet, and another man, or woman, or child, whose only crime was birth.
And the Fourteenth Brother will never see him again, never look into devastated brown eyes, and never see himself reflected back in them—eyes sulfur yellow and lightsaber crimson, bled and tainted on those he used to fight beside, and for.