#Kotor I

[oonaluna-art]

I fell for someone new But she's just another girl that looks like you What's love if it's not true? It's just another girl that looks like you

The great thing about Revan and Malak as a ship is that the two of them get to experience the person they love warping into someone unrecognizable, either through force-corruption or memory loss.

[darthdori]

juhani for pride month 💕

[flatscans]

[a-artist-a]

Ghost in the Mirror (Kotor FF)

Who am I?

A question I cannot answer. People look at me and see a corpse. They call me master and monster. They call me enemy and ally. I am not you. I am not Revan. Your body was stolen for me. I wear your face and wish for your mask. Even an erased line can leave a mark, if you pressed hard enough. Is it the same for memories? It must be.

Is the Council my parent for they have created me? I am not a child. I am not a man. I am a ghost, possessing the wrong body. Whose mind did you implant? Whose mind did you steal? Am I made of hundred fragments? Did you run back time? Is that what I am, a mere could-have-been?

The shattered reflection of one they hate as much as they love. They want you, Revan, not me, not this pale imitation. And yet, they judge. How dare they!

My creators reject me. I am imperfect, lacking in obedience and memories. They cut it all away and now want it to return, under their command. I cannot be you.

I don't have a past, so how can I have a future? My present was stolen and I want to give it up. Take it back, haunting spectre in the mirror! Take it back and leave me alone. May it be my undoing, all would be better than this hollow half-life.

Oh Revan, did you feel that way, too? You are not even a proper ghost. Haunt me, please, so I may know you at least got to die. Set me free.

They pretend that by creating me they did not kill you, but we know that is a lie. You are dead and gone, no chance coming back. No body and no soul left. I hope you hid a holocron away.

I try to remember. I promise I do! How am I supposed to know what's real?

Was it a dream or a wish for happiness?

You hugged Malak, back when he wore another name, and you as well, no mask in sight. I don't even know the name. Who were you once? Why did erase yourself? Oh Revan, I hope you felt not like I do. They should have buried us.

Why did you fall? People keep asking that. I only dream of darkness and determination. Do what I must, I will not turn back. They don't want to know what I ask you.

I'll kill in their name, on their demand. I'll kill your once-friend. I'll kill my enemy. They'll say I turned back from the darkness, but we know: You cannot leave behind what you never even knew.

There will be no redemption for us. There is only death.

[yellow-faerie]

Immortality AU

There’s a woman standing at the edge of the cantina. She has a drink in her hand – something the colour of a Felucian flower – and is smiling, softly, as she taps her foot to the beat of the music. Her eyes are a pale blue – so pale that it is noticeable in the dingy lighting and from such a distance – with laugh lines creasing at their edges as she keeps her avid attention focused on the singer.

It would be difficult to tell how old she is, just from looking. She’s almost definitely human, so the wrinkles and her almost-white hair would put her on the older end of the spectrum, but there’s still the soft curve of early adulthood to her.

So late thirties, maybe early forties.

Her name is Meetra Surik and though she does not look it, she is nearly four thousand years old.

None of this does Qui-Gon Jinn tell Padmé, the young handmaiden who had insisted (on the Queen’s demand) to accompany him on this mission, for he had told her they were coming here to see if they could source an alternative form of transport if they couldn’t fix the ship.

And in a way, they were, but Qui-Gon was never sure how Surik and her less agreeable companion worked. There was every chance that they would make vague conversation until Qui-Gon admitted defeat and they had to work out another solution to their problem.

Damn immortals.

“Master Qui-Gon,” Surik greets as he gets close enough to hear her, although she doesn’t take her eyes from the singer, “aren’t you meant to be orbiting Naboo? Negotiations with the Trade Federation, wasn’t it?”

Qui-Gon can feel Padmé’s surprise in the Force, likely that he knew anyone on this Force forsaken rock. “Do you keep tabs on everyone, or is it just me?”

“Can you blame a woman for looking out for her lineage?”

“You know each other?” Padmé asks, intervening. Either it is her diplomatic skills coming out, breaking up a potential argument before it starts, or – and this was much more likely in Qui-Gon’s opinion – she was curious and couldn’t help herself.

“I trained his Master’s Jedi Master,” Surik says pleasantly and finally takes her eyes away from the performer. “Master Meetra Surik, at your service.”

“Padmé Naberrie.”

There’s a flash of amusement in her eyes. “I take it that you have got caught up in whatever went wrong with Master Jinn’s recent mission?”

“I’m the Queen of Naboo’s handmaiden. And it wasn’t Master Jinn’s fault, the Trade Federation didn’t even let the negotiations for our planet begin before they tried to kill him and Padawan Kenobi, and invade our planet.”

Surik’s smile falls into something more serious. “A planetary invasion? That’s a bold move.”

“It is,” Qui-Gon agrees quickly, not feeling quite comfortable to discuss the issue so publicly. “The escape was not kind on our ship, we need a way off planet so that the Queen may speak in the senate.”

At that, Surik’s smile returns in all it’s slightly lopsided glory. “Luckily for you, we have a ship.”

“And what about ours?” Padmé asks. “The one we came in?”

Meetra shrugs. “Do what you want with it: sell it, leave it for scrap, find a way to repair it. Just comm us when you’re ready, we’ll do a pick up.”

The singer has stopped now, to muted applause from the otherwise self-absorbed clientele of the cantina, and stepped down from the stage to get her money from the bartender.

“Then we shall meet you then,” Qui-Gon says quickly and Meetra’s smile grows.

“Are you sure I cannot tempt you to a drink?”

Qui-Gon looks at the singer, returning a few credits for a drink an even brighter colour than Meetra’s, and thinks that now is not a time to talk to Revan.

In fact, it is never a time to talk to Revan, but especially not when Obi-Wan is not there to be a buffer.

“Another time, perhaps,” he says smoothly, putting a hand on Padmé’s back to gently guide her out of the cantina, “we have a ship to sell.”

[ncfan-1]

So, I have KOTOR brainworms again. It seems this happens every couples of years, and every time it does, my head canon becomes more refined, changes, or a combination of both. Something that I’m now kinda obsessed with is the head canon forming in my head of Revan giving the Exile control of the Mass Shadow Generator for the battle of Malachor V constituting the first major breach in Revan’s relationship with Malak.

I’ve never really imagined Revan and the Exile being particularly close, even in the early days of their involvement of the Mandalorian Wars, before everything really went to shit. They were in certain respects very similar, which sometimes led to them flinching away because they saw what they considered the worst aspects of themselves mirrored in the other and Did Not Like It. And in other ways, very different, which was in turn jarring to them, irritating because the other did not respond the way they expected. They were like oil and water; the running joke among the first cohort of Revanchist Jedi was that the two of them could get on each other’s nerves from opposite ends of a star system. Not to say that it was always bad. They came together on matters of tactics and strategy, and always, always trusted the other to be as committed as they were towards their ultimate goal. But on a personal level, in the beginning they were like oil and water, periodically friendly but largely on each other’s nerves, and as things wore on and things deteriorated, largely at each other’s throats.

The one constant commonality between Revan and the Exile was Malak. Revan and Malak had been friends ever since they first met as children freshly brought into the Jedi Order, and the Exile and Malak had been friends ever since the latter brought the Exile into the fold of the Revanchists. Revan and Malak are ride-or-die for each other, of course, and the Exile does not do casual friendships; the few friends she has, she forms extremely intense relationships with, and Malak is no exception. (The Exile’s unusual power regarding Force bonds definitely plays a part here, but a lot of it does also boil down to the fact that she is a very intense person.)

He’s always been in the middle between them, ever since the three of them came into each other’s orbits. Friends with both of them, often stuck playing peacekeeper between them when they got into actual arguments instead of mild bickering, and sometimes stuck physically pulling them apart as things wore on and those arguments started to get a bit… violent.

And always in their shadow.

Malak has always felt just a bit inadequate compared to them. Always second best to the twin forces of nature that are Revan and the Exile. Early on, he was largely able to swallow it down. None of them were really struggling with either the Dark Side or PTSD early on, and a combination of Jedi training in managing negative emotions and his friendship with both of them meant that he largely dismissed these feelings of inadequacy, and focused on the task at hand: beating the Mandalorians back and restoring the Republic to safety.

But the war dragged on, and things started deteriorating, and things… changed.

The general hierarchy when it comes to capable people in the forces arrayed against the Mandalorians are: Revan > the Exile >>>>>>>> everybody else. Malak’s right around the top of that ‘everybody else’ category, and it does mark him out as more capable than most everyone else, but he can’t see that. All he can see is that he’s stuck in their shadows, that they are more capable than him, as military officers and as Jedi, that they are more respected than him, more renowned. He takes some consolation in the fact that Revan trusts him on a personal level, in a way she does not trust the Exile anymore. At least Revan takes him seriously.

But then… But then, Revan hands the Exile the Mass Shadow Generator for the battle of Malachor V.

Revan and Malak have not discovered the Sith threat lurking outside of Republic space, not yet. But Revan already has conceived of the idea that the Republic must grow stronger in order to be safe from future threats, and she very much regards herselfas the person to make it grow stronger. But she, not without reason, regards the Exile as a potential threat to these plans. The Exile is the only Revanchist Jedi unafraid of vocally arguing with her. As the Revanchists formed as the result of a schism within the Jedi Order, there is now emerging a schism within the Revanchists, and this splinter faction would not just take the Exile as a focal point, but would see her emerge as an active leader if it is allowed to fully blossom. Many of the Revanchist Jedi went to war following the Exile’s example, and those who are for whatever reason dissatisfied with Revan’s methods look to her.

So as per what’s strongly implied in KOTOR II, Revan takes Malachor V as an opportunity to clean house, using the Mass Shadow Generator as her implement. Those Jedi who could potentially break away from the Revanchists will be placed in space above the planet, either within the radius of the Mass Shadow Generator where they will surely be killed, or close enough to it that its sheer destructive power, the echoes in the Force of so many deaths, will serve to break them to her will. As for the Exile, either is fine, but Revan would rather ‘dead’ be the outcome. ‘Dead’ is much neater.

Malak knows about all of this, of course. Revan trusts him above all others, and he is accordingly the only person who knows what she intends by giving control of the Mass Shadow Generator to the Exile. Just a few months ago, he would have been relieved by this gesture, though regretful, even horrified, thanks to his friendship with the Exile. He would have been relieved that Revan trusted him with such a dangerous secret. But… but things have changed. Like nearly all of the Revanchist Jedi, Malak has grown so numb to death that he can’t muster horror at the idea of so many Jedi being set up to be killed or broken like this, even though one of them is a close friend. He can’t see the gesture of trust for what it is.

You take her seriously as a threat to your plans. You take her seriously as a rival.

You take her seriously. You don’t take me seriously.

No confrontation at this time. But he never forgets it.

[rubensmuse]

the people who make this game think they’re soOOOOoo FUCKING funny

[trila-venzien-isdarthrevan]

[oonaluna-art]

I’m supposed to be working on a paper, but I was excited by @kotor-week’s prompt list.

Today’s prompt is the Jedi Exile. This is my design of her. During her years after the Mandalorian war, I see her as having moved from job to job in the outer rim. She makes enough money to survive, but little else, and moves from place to place frequently enough that she doesn’t develop any personal connections.

Here she is as a farming hand, maybe overhearing some gossip that she resembles a Jedi General from a war she keeps trying to forget.

[flatscans]

[revanknightwoman]

@walkerings-blog I really like your style, nice work

—— Savior

well I need to post this one separately

[a-artist-a]

Faithful friend (Kotor FF)

Seven years. Seven years of waiting, waiting for Revan to return. Seven years the Exile spent in suspension, haunting the corners of the galaxy, waiting for their call, a message, anything at all. Nothing ever came. Seven years of wasting away, all for nothing.

The first year the Exile mediated and trained, studied and preached, taught and fought, every day awaiting his master's return, their summon. It never came.

The second year the Exile worried and wandered, helping here and there, recruiting a few lost souls and stared at the stars as if he could see by which Revan was.

The third year the Exile became restless. Wandering was not enough. He hesitated, called his old friends and allies, made their goodbyes. Not that any of them knew it would be a goodbye. They'd want to accompany him or worse, stop him.

In all the corners of the galaxy he searched. Oh, how he searched! He followed the voices in his head and that thin thread still binding him to Revan, a gold and red thread, just like their armour, to the farthest fringes of the galaxy and beyond – but never to Revan.

Giving up felt like killing them. They were still alive, weren't they? He shouldn't give up. He shouldn't. As long as that string still bound them together, the Exile knew Revan still lived. It was a noose around his neck. Was it hope or despair, to wish to be bound and unbound?

Destiny could only be severed by death, but force bonds could be cut with a blade, physical or mental. It only took conviction. Revan's voice still whispered in his ear, a ghost and a memory. The force shall free me.

In the hills of Daintooine the Exile build a pyre, near that hidden cave where it all began. A pyre for two. A pyre for us, a pyre for all that was, you, me and him. You made me into what I am today: Jedi and Sith, but most of all Revanchist. He set the wood on fire and let their bond unravel. May the Force be with you, my dearest friend. I'll see you on the other side.

[yellow-faerie]

Different Fates AU

Something about fate is that it is never certain.

The year is 1020 AHW and three children stand on the precipice of something more: Alek, scorched clothes catching at the edges of burn as he turns to look at the burning wreck of his home; Kimera, praying to the Old Gods as she listens to the battle above her hiding spot in the roots of the trees; Revael, crawling through the whirring mechanisms of the factory around her.

They do not know they stand there.

They do not know that what happens next will lay their lives out before them, and that even if their choices take them on paths far from each other, fate will inexorably and inevitably drag them back together.

This is how it starts.

+

Alek may stop, may fall to his knees and cry as the oncoming firestorm swallows him body and soul.

There are few universes that he does, for there is something fundamental in Alek that refuses to allow him to fall to despair even at his worst moments. It is the same here: he drags himself forward, swallows the pain of his mother’s eyes, his father’s grasping hand, the terrible cries all around him.

He keeps going. He gathers his few remaining people together and that is how they stay until they find an old, abandoned ship to get off planet on and join the crawling lines of refugees into the Republic space.

He sets his name as Alek on his new documentation and proudly adds his village’s name as his surname. They may be split up, him and those few other survivors, but there shall always be that thin thread that connects them.

A name.

The Jedi find him, and they are kind. They turn him from a scared adolescent into a man with a sure hand and a golden tongue.

His master, Arren Kae, is never entirely pleased with what he does. Atris – his only real friend his age – says that is just because she is a severe woman with no room for error, but sometimes when Master Kae looks at him, Alek thinks that she expects him to be more.

To be someone else.

Atris never lets him get too far into those sort of thoughts.

When Alek first joined the Jedi, a gangly nearly-thirteen-year-old, he spoke heavily accented Basic and even among a relatively unjudgmental people, he felt out of place.

He has studied a lot and that was how he met her: they shared a table in the Archives until that was their regular every day. Alek knows very little about Atris’ path and she knows very little about his, but they understand each other better than anyone else in that place – better, even, than their masters – and so they are best friends.

Alek knows that she, too, feels as though there is meant to be someone else beside her.

When the Mandalorian wars arise, Alek is the one to stand up against the tide of evil when the Jedi Council sits back and does nothing. It feels wrong and it feels right but Alek just knows that he cannot allow more people to feel as untethered as he did when he was younger and so he fights and he leads and-

He leaves the Jedi Temple behind. He leaves Atris behind with betrayal swimming in her eyes. He leaves Master Kae and her slight frown. He leaves it in the dust – an old attachment he must let go of.

And when he sleeps, he dreams.

+

Kimera has an option, lying in the roots of this terribly old tree.

Sometimes, she stays put – that is what her mother told her to do as she reloaded her slugthrower and ruffled her hair for the last time – and when the fighting dies down, her quiet crying flows through the empty silence. A Jedi finds her there and then she is Mandalorian no longer.

She hides with her father’s armour and the last of their rations and – most importantly – her uncle’s spare blaster.

She cannot sit here and do nothing.

Kimera is not an advantage to have on the battlefield, by any means, but her presence changes something and then her fate is set.

In the aftermath of the battle, her mother takes the fallen’s weapons and then she and her uncle and her aunts and her older cousin pile the bodies upon a pyre.

Kimera sometimes thinks she can still see the sightless eyes of the Enemy looking at her from that fire. She can never work out whether they deserved to die.

Clan Surik is small, depleted from the hundreds they once were by the Great Sith War. They had not stopped fighting since the apparent defeat of Exar Kun nearly sixteen years ago and so now it was just the six of them.

Kimera tries not to feel sad about the death around her.

She follows the Resol’nare in pride: she speaks the language, wears the armour, defends and provides for her clan, and is ready to follow the Mand’alor should he call upon them.

She is proud to be Mandalorian, to be trained to fight with such finesse as her ancestors of old and to sit around the fire with her family when the night falls, but…

Well, her father’s armour doesn’t fit her very well.

The Mand’alor does eventually call them to fight: her aunts have adopted another two orphans, who had once been slaves far beyond the reach of the Republic, and her cousin has married and had children of his own. There are eleven of them now and they rally those who had once followed them, all that time ago, to their cause – to the cause of all of Mandalore and its peoples.

They go to battle.

Her pistols feel wrong in her hands, Kimera thinks, as she lies restlessly upon her bedroll, and she can’t get the fear out of her head: the way people looked at her as she marched forward with her people.

And those eyes, of a dead Jedi long ago, looking straight at her from his funeral pyre in silent judgement.

+

Revael loses her foot to the machines a lot.

Not this universe. She doesn’t get distracted by her thoughts, or the throbbing of the machine around her, or the pain in her knees.

She gets out.

There is no scream in the Force, nothing to signify to the Jedi in their Temple that there is something wrong. Perhaps the Jedi out in the rest of the universe are better, but those that have made Corellia their home are happy to ignore the stench of rot when it pleases them.

For Corellia is a slave planet, although the Republic ignores that.

On the outside, it has the veneer of something beautiful and upstanding but that image is held up by the blood and sweat and lives of sentient beings who are cheaper than droids, easier to maintain than droids, cleverer than droids.

They maintain the great Industrial districts which make Corellia famous. They work in the warehouses, somewhere beyond the cameras. They work in plain sight for the upstanding criminals that have made Corellia their home.

Revael knows this, for as she grows up – to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen – until she is too big to fit into the machine and is moved to maintenance, the others begin to engage her in their muttered conversations.

Before, she only had her chosen-mother, the woman who kept her alive since she had been little. The others did not talk to her more than they had to, for children died more than anyone in those dark depths of the slave factories, and getting attached was foolish.

Now, Merillan is gone: dead or sold or something else equally terrible, Revael doesn’t know.

Now it is just her and this growing anger that she is here at all.

The slave tongue was familiar to her, for that was what Merillan whispered to her in the dark, but here is where she learned the stories and the myths.

Here is where she first heard of Revan, the relkin who burns their way through factories and leads the slaves forward.

“It is a particularly Corellian idea,” Revael hears one slave say to another, “on Tatooine, freedom comes with the rain, or with death. Fire is a tool of Depur.”

“Well, Revan is not a word in Amatakka, is it?” The other replies, in the same hushed undertones.

It leaves Revael, playing with the insides of a broken down droid in the pretence of doing work, thinking. She is clever and quick and perhaps…

She ducks her head as Depur passes by but she turns her eyes up, to look at his unprotected back.

Foolish, to think that he is safe in this place.

+

And so the children step, and they no longer grow up together, but fate (or maybe, if you are inclined to those sort of beliefs, it is the Force) is not inclined to rest at that.

Kimera watches her cousins sparring together and tries to push down the feeling that the war they’re fighting is wrong, and that she is watching the wrong people fighting, and that her gun doesn’t fit as neatly in her hand as a blade-

Alek sits in a Republic office, organising the last of the ships under his new command to be in the right places and filled with the right troops for when the official schism from the Order occurs and he can take the Jedi to join them, and he finds himself lonely for a touch he has never known and laughing voices he has never heard and the kiss-

Revael slips into a fresher alone and pulls down the cloth mask that keeps her face hidden, and she looks at her reflection and wonders what Merillan would think of the work she has done to free so many, to burn the name Revan into the consciousnesses of people who sit back while others suffer-

They do not know that in a mere few weeks, their paths will meet and then…

And then their fates will be entwined, as they always have been.