#and with a Revan who puts her deep seated sense of justice to a different use

[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.