A/N: Also known as the angsty self-indulgent second-person Evren Straik backstory fic. Enjoy.

Learning Curve

o.O.o

You're eleven and the world is collapsing. You can't breathe. Can't turn your head or close your eyes or look away. Your mother is clawing at her throat and gasping for air and your father lies broken on the ground, and all the while she is laughing. You thrash against her apprentice's grip but can't break free. The wire at your neck bites into the skin. All you can do is watch, and learn to hate.

You're fourteen and your lips ache from the needles but you are proud, so very proud to have earned the red marks of your bloodline. One step closer to the day you destroy her. That is the way of things. You will surpass her. You will live. Whatever the cost, you will live, if only to spite her. You made your first kill yesterday. You're proud. You are.

You're nineteen, on your knees and retching into the mud. There's blood on your sword and under your nails and in your mouth and you can't take it anymore, you can't do this, you hate this—empty promises of power, endless cycles of death—what is the point of any of it, when it causes nothing but more pain? You don't know what else there could be but you know that something in you is starting to break. Dead eyes gaze sightlessly up at the endless stormclouds. You look away.

You're twenty-three and there's a Jedi behind the red energy field, speech meandering and slurred from the drugs crawling through his veins. The Force is so quiet around him. Calm. You could kill thousands by your silence and you are sickened. You tell him that he has been manipulated, that his memories are confused and false. He thanks you. He says he is worried for your safety. He says you could have been a Jedi, in another life. You don't know what to do, how to respond, so you brush him off and lie through your teeth as you report success to the overseer. You pity him. It should disgust you. You are a traitor. Your hands are shaking.

You're twenty-four. Vette. Her name is Vette and she is so, so brave.

You're twenty-four in a cave full of refugees, full of children, red lightsabers humming at your sides as a man pleads for their lives and his voice is lost in the lurching roar of your heartbeat. You breathe. You power down your lightsabers and start snapping out orders to evacuate, local patrol schedules, weaknesses in your own side's stranglehold on the planet—anything to get them out, help them, save them.

You're twenty-four, facing your own twisted reflection under twin suns. It sneers at the light in you—what light? The hollow paralysis of a conscience, the terror of giving a damn? But you can't stop caring. You will not, will never stop, if only to spite this monstrous thing that you could have been. And if that is light . . . So you look your reflection in the gleaming red eye and tell it to go to hell. This is not the end. You grin, ignite your blades, hold your ground as the dark screams its fury.

(You know what you are. Sith, and yet. And yet—)

Your light is blood-red fire but it is bright enough to keep the dark at bay.

o.O.o