Regret and Remembrance

Chapter 2-

"White"

It is a white day, the day the storm-troopers take him prisoner.

Kyp Durron thinks it strange that on a day fire burned orange across the sky and blood ran red in the streets as the storm-troopers cut down the inhabitants of his home-planet what he remembers best is the white.

White armor. White moonlight. White stars.

All white.

This is how it happens.

As he learns so brutally on that day, the Galactic Empire functions according to an inexorable code of rules. The Emperor Palpatine and his minions, who cast a long shadow over the galaxy—and who will continue to do so after their deaths—cannot tolerate dissent in any shape or form. Like most dictators, the hold their political power like a mother clutching onto the child about to be ripped from her arms, and any questioning or complaints infuriates them. As many other powerful men before them, they has come to think of themselves as…absolute—able to make the rules and hold life and death in the palms of their hands. To obey the Empire is to live, and to disobey is to die. It is all very simple, really.

So when the citizens of Deyer dare to protest the Ghorman Massacre, the Empire reacts decisively, scrambling to crush the rats who would dare question the Empire's actions in a storm of fury. The local Imperial garrison calls for backup, ships rain down fire from the sky, setting the capital city of Freiya ablaze, and the white horde of storm-troopers descend upon the houses of the citizens with impunity, barely stopping to read a one-line arrest warrant before they stun and drag their victims out into the streets for deportation to an unknown location. Those who dare resist are cut down without mercy.

It is all very…simple, really. The Empire wins and Deyer loses, and the citizens of the peaceful aquatic world must…bear the consequences of their loss…without any hope of aid.

It is how young Kyp Durron finds himself huddled in his bed one night shuddering as he feels the earth shaking beneath him for the thousand and first time that day. It has been seven days since Empire…attacked Deyer…and for the same number of days he has lived in terrible fear, trembling at every foreign sound and wincing as he hears cries drift up to his family's apartment from the streets and canals. Shivering, he burrows a little closer to the warmth emanating from his brother's side, and relaxes slightly when the older boy turns over on the mattress, wrapping an arm around his small shoulders before pulling him firmly against his warm chest. Zeth's breathing pulses even and steady, even though he twitches with fear, and the rhythm that is one of Kyp's first memories calms him enough to close his eyes. Nonetheless, terror churns the remains of his last meal in his stomach, bringing a sour taste to the back of his throat and making icy prickles run like tiny needles over his skin. I'm safe, he tries to tell himself, attempting to visualize the most peaceful memory he has, but the phantom rumblings drifting through the window makes reaching for those memories difficult. Dad and Mom and Zeth are all here, and the storm-troopers haven't come for us yet, so maybe they don't think we did anything wrong.

Despite his youth, however, he realizes that is only wishful thinking at best, and denial at worst. His parents hold positions on the city council, and prior to the Imperial crackdown they made no secret of their anti-Imperial stance; therefore, it's probably only a matter of time before the troopers melt down their door and storm in and take them all away.

As if to validate his sudden suspicions, the bed and the ground beneath him shakes violently as the sound of an explosion splits the air, making his ears ache and ring horribly at the same time. His head spins as he starts up in bed, shaking, just in time to see, through the window, flames billow up into the sky several hundred meters away, black smoke pluming up from the orange-red inferno in great billows. He stares horrified, wrinkling his nose as the acrid smell of smoke and burning things scorches the sensitive lining of his nose. Tears scald the corners of his eyes.

Zeth wraps a warm hand around his arm and tugs his brother back down onto the bed, but Kyp knows he has no hope of sleeping tonight. Not after this. Please, I don't want to die, he thinks desperately as he stares up in horror at the red flames lighting up the dark night sky spangled with stars, flinching once more as he hears the unmistakable bang bang bang of artillery shells exploding somewhere far off in the city. Half-dazedly he wonders how in the hell his city became another shade of Hades, instead of the safe haven he's always known.

He hates it, and he hates the ones doing this even more.

"Go to sleep, Kyp," Zeth murmurs softly in his ear, his low voice soothing, but subdued, so unlike his natural jovial and mischievous tones. "I don't think they'll be shelling anymore tonight."

Somehow, Kyp manages to relax enough to eventually drop off to sleep, wrapped in his brother's warm arms, syncing his breaths to the steady rise and fall of Zeth's chest. It's the last time for eight years he'll ever feel even remotely safe.

The sensation of something hard and cold striking his face, burning a streak of fire across his cheeks, jerks him out of sleep, and when he opens his eyes, all he sees is a terrible, all-consuming white….white—the color of fear. A horrible, blinding white light shines into his face and he reflexively squints as stars dance in front of his aching eyes, recalling fuzzily that he is sure Zeth turned off the lights before they went to bed. He barely has time to process this thought before a cold, hard appendage wraps around his shoulder and hauls him to the edge of the bed in one smooth motion before releasing him as he thuds to the floor painfully, his head spinning with the sudden movement.

The cold surface of the floor sends what feels like cold stabbing little needles skittering up his limbs as he lands half on his hands and knees, and he yelps, blinking wildly as he looks up to see his assailant.

Then, he screams.

Screams as he meets soulless black orbs that cover eyes, screams as horror pulses through him as his eyes rove over the thick white breathing apparatus that looks like some sort of grotesque mouth, screams as he stares at the white armor of the storm-trooper standing over him in his own bedroom. Sharp, aching pain blossoms in his side like a red flower as a white boot connects with his side. "Get up off the floor, you rat," a strange flat voice emanates from the helmet. "Get dressed! Now!"

Kyp cringes backwards as the storm-trooper raises his weapon.

He glances around the room, and makes out the form of his brother kneeling in the shadows by the doorway, his hands on his head. Another storm-trooper stands behind him, the black barrel of his weapon pressed firmly to the back of his brother's head, and although his face is turned away, Kyp can see the fear written in every line of his brother's lean, taut body.

He never knows how he gets off the floor that night, how he manages to find his clothes and put on his boots, but he remembers with shocking clarity the drops of cold sweat that trickle down his back, leaving a cold damp trail in their wake, when the storm-trooper presses the barrel of his weapon against his back. The muzzle is hard, and it's cold—colder than anything he's ever felt before, and he feels as if Death itself is brushing its ghostly fingers against his back as he stumbles towards the door of the room in the dimness.

Tears cloud his vision for the second time this night as he steps over the threshold of his room, the film thickening until they overflow, burning his eyes and flowing down his cheeks, leaving warm wet trails in their wake as they roll down to drip off his chin. The only light in the hall is the blinding white light in the storm-trooper's hand, and Kyp notes how stiff and horrible and white the storm-trooper's back before him looks, and how foreboding the thudding of their footsteps sound as the storm-troopers march them down the corridor. He feels as if he is walking into a dark unknown where the rules are different and a sense of strange fulfillment of his own dread as he walks away from everything he has known and loved since his birth. I don't want to die, he thinks desperately as the storm-trooper jams the cold circle against his back a little more firmly, and terror temporarily seizes his muscles and he trembles uncontrollably, horror pulsing through him as he considers what should happen if the storm-trooper should pull that terrible trigger, or if the one in front should kill his brother. Please, please, please, he pleads silently, don't let them kill Zeth, don't let them kill mom or dad.

The coldness remains at his back and the white—white armor, the personification of his worst nightmare—before him as he stumbles down the corridor, down the staircase in the darkness of the home that now feels foreign where it once felt familiar, as if this house is not his anymore but now a foreign enclave where he is a stranger within its walls. Only later, much later does it occur to him that he should have said goodbye to the dwelling that had sheltered him for eight years, when any hope of reclaiming the past was long gone.

Down the staircase, through the halls, through the dining room where the white moonlight and starlight pour through the windows and bathe the tableau in a ghostly light. Years later, when he tries to remember what the dining room looked like that night, he cannot remember a damn thing, because all he saw was the way the white light reflected off the armor of the storm-trooper ahead of him and made him seem even larger and more frightening, like a person about to crush an insect beneath his heel. He stumbles as he reaches the door that leads from the dining room to the living room, and it's the first time he can even feel his legs since the storm-trooper entered his room, red pain shooting through his shoulder like a dart as he clumsily collides with the wall. Pain is red, he thinks for a moment, just before more red pain explodes in the center of his back as the storm-trooper jams the blaster harder against his tender flesh. He feels his skin bruising, sending aches radiating through his back and up into his sinewy shoulders as the man growls, "Move it, pig!" as if talking to an animal, "Stop dawdling!"

Tears burning his eyes once more, he blinks and they run down his cheeks as he lurches into the living room, a sudden indignation flaring up in him, and for a moment the crimson anger at being addressed like an animal temporarily overrules the white fear eating his insides. I have a name! Something in him longs to shout as royal blue dignity flares in his chest, but something—lavender prudence—keeps him silent.

Inside the living room, it shines even whiter, and the fear numbing his muscles and sealing his lips as surely as if he's gagged presses down on his young back even more oppressively. On the floor on the far side of the room lies what used to be the front door, the edges of the metal slab glowing red around the edges as smoke curls up in little black wisps, filling the room with a stench of scorched metal which sears his nostrils and increases the flow of crystal already streaming down his cheeks. Cold air gusts in through the aperture, and on the sea meters from the door he can see boats lit with massive white orbs that nearly blind him and make him blink as he turns his head away. Next to the couch his parents kneel, their hands on their heads, while one more storm-trooper stands behind them, blaster at the ready, pointed at the backs of his parents' heads.

Powerlessness sweeps over him. If his parents have fallen, what chance does he have? He will be swept away by the white.

He whimpers slightly as his head begins to ache violently, a great swelling, cracking pain filing his skull because there is just too much white, too much fear. Darkness presses in at the corners of his eyes, and he wants to let it sweep him under and hide him from the white. But then his father turns his head fractionally, just enough so that his dark brown eyes lock with Kyp's and everything around them fades to the background for a moment as his father's eyes bore into his own. They are calm, controlled, and there is not one bit of white in the dark pupils—an anchor amidst the storm rising around him. Be brave, those eyes say, and for a moment he thinks everything may turn out alright before the terrible white intrudes again, chilling his stomach.

"Is this everyone?" the storm-trooper behind his father drones mechanically, apparently posing the question to the storm-troopers holding him and his brother hostage.

"Everyone, sir," the storm-trooper behind him confirms in his terrible mechanical voice. "There was nothing upstairs except the boy and this runt."

Red rage provoked by the slur boils in his insides; he stews with fury at the continuous insults. I may be small for my age but I'm strong, he hisses mentally, but the hot anger dies down into embers as he realizes with a flood of grey despair that it will do him absolutely no good to protest. He is helpless in the ocean of the white, helpless in the grasps of his captors and there is precious little he can do about that.

"Valus and Calla Durron," the storm-trooper holding his parents hostage intones, "you are both charged with high treason against His Imperial Majesty's Galactic Empire, and are therefore under arrest." It sounds horribly final as he says it, Kyp thinks, as if he is announcing the end of an era, and he senses somewhere deep within him that this single sentence snuffs out the light he's lived in, and opens the door to the cold darkness he once dreamed about, months ago.

His eyes widen with shock as his father half-laughs, the sound raspy and choked-sounding. "I think you've already arrested us, so why the hell are you talking about it?" His tone is bitter, bitter as wormwood, terrible and foreign intonations coloring every cadence of his familiar deep voice, and Kyp screams in horror, the sound grating on his ears like the sound of nails on a chalkboard, as the storm-trooper raises his blaster, the trigger clicking as he pulls it back. A zinging sound rings in his ears as a burst of blue bolts shoots from the muzzle of the black weapon, hitting his father in the back of the head at point-blank range. His father seems to fall in slow motion, his eyes shutting as his head falls forward and his hands wobble before he crumples to a heap on the floor with a thud.

Kyp screams. Again.

We're all going to die, we're all going to die, we're all going to die he thinks but realizes, just as the trooper levels his blaster at his mother's head, that the shots fired into his father's head are stun bolts, and he still lives, and a wild yellow hope rises in his chest and floods his being that leaves his legs feeling jellylike. He barely has time to process this, however, before Zeth is leaping forward, his taut body coiling and springing like a cat's, shouting in a terrible, desperate, hoarse voice Kyp has never heard before "No!" as blue bolts lance out of the muzzle of the second blaster and enter the back of his mother's head. She sways for a moment like a reed in the wind before she crumples forward, and then the storm-trooper raises and levels his blaster, the terrible black barrel swinging in the light like a thing possessed, pointing at his brother's chest and discharging a staccato burst of the blue bolts.

The bolts catch Zeth in the chest just as reaches their prone mother's side, and his brother lets out a sort of strangled cry as he takes one stumbling step backward before his legs give out and he falls…twisted, to land partly on his side and partly on his back on the ground, stretched out in a grotesque pose.

Kyp screams one more time before a sharp pain shoots through the back of his head that brings hot saliva pouring into his mouth as he clenches his jaw involuntarily, and a strange tingling numbness spreads over his body as the ground rushes up at him.

The last thing he remembers seeing is how horribly white the moonlight and starlight looks shining upon the prone bodies of those he loves best before the blackness swallows him up.

He won't see the sun again for eight years.

A/N: Any feedback is appreciated as always. As an aside, I'm no expert on color symbolism, so if some of the colors here represent incorrect things, I apologize! I just used the colors that I personally associate with certain emotions.