Woven in my Soul

A/N: I'm, uh… not sure. I went in with the idea for something fluffy and this was what happened instead. It sort of wrote itself. So. Featuring: SlightlyDark!Carth. A Doctor Who reference! A title ripped from my current favorite song! A slightly disjointed, aimless construction! My first return to the KotOR writing world in SO LONG!

Enjoy. (And if you actually happen to enjoy, please do review, they make me so happy.)

Closure is a pretty word; dressed in idealism, soaked in promises of peace.

When the last shot is fired on the Leviathan's bridge, and when the last body falls, there is a pause. Everything just stops, grinds to a halt so suddenly that it seems to leave them all hanging, waiting for more. But there is no more. Smoke drifts upwards from broken consoles, and light from the battle outside coldly stains the silver armor of fallen Sith, and the three of them left standing catch their breath in the quiet.

And then the quiet snaps.

A wheezing breath from the shadows, and Carth's head snaps round and recognition flares sharp. He bears down on the fallen Admiral like a predatory thing: his head ducked, his shoulders bared, sweat drying cold on the back of his neck.

He scoops up a sword from the floor, his blaster clattering away when he tosses it aside, and as Saul scrambles backward on buckling hands and knees Carth snags him by the shirt collar and hauls him up with all the strength provided by adrenaline and rage and a grudge nursed half a decade.

Saul stares back with wide eyes, whites capped with the blistered red of burst blood vessels. Carth drags him close, clenching his teeth as the sharp edge of smoke in the air singes the inside of his nose and chokes him, collecting in the back of his throat.

Bastila says, "Carth."

The woman he will come to know as Revan says nothing, only watches.

"You watched it burn," Carth says. His voice is a blade's edge, barely audible words bitten out through his teeth.

Saul is silent, still.

The two of them face-to-face, Carth shoves the sword through Saul's gut, twists savagely.

The fires of Telos have long smoldered out, but they still burn on in his nightmares.

A bloodbath that leaked into the sky, staining it red around the edges as the sun was swallowed by smoke; Carth remembers stepping off with his squad onto the ground, already turned to ashes that sank under the pressure of his boots. He remembers the stink of bodies burning. He remembers the screaming.

The screaming. Women. Children. Everyone.

He still hears it.

Telos was supposed to be safe, sheltered away from the worst of the war. It's what he promised his wife the last time he left.

You'll be safe here.

They weren't.

Saul's blood drips onto his hand, slick between his fingers as he jerks the sword free and lets the traitor crumple like a burning piece of paper, folding on himself, seeming to shrink. He looks like what he really is now; an old man, twisted and tired and sprawled on the metal grates of his ship's floor.

Carth tosses the sword aside to follow his blaster. It clatters and slides away, into the shadows of the bridge's edge and out of sight.

Saul laughs; a terrible choking sound. He looks at Carth with fading eyes, beckons him close with an errant gesture of his hand that could be an involuntary death spasm but Carth knows it isn't. Everything in him tells him to go, to run, but he doesn't; he bends down, steps toward the dying admiral.

Saul's hand shudders, snaps out to grip the edge of Carth's jacket, jerking him closer.

"Let me tell you something," he gasps out, disconnected syllables choked through a spasmodic fit of coughing.

His whisper is hoarse and barely lucid, but when he finishes Carth just lets go, sags back on his heels.

And Saul, bleeding out on the floor of his prized ship, gets the last laugh.

He's saved her a thousand times in the dreams.

He gets there earlier, or her wounds are manageable, or she just lives, inexplicable, because how the galaxy could take someone like her away Carth will never understand. It goes against everything that is right and everything that is fair.

In reality all he has are the harsh memories, broken all apart by shock and near-unbearable grief, patched together in uneven order by the passage of time. Scraps of things, images and pieces.

The crumpled shape of her body in the rubble, caught in the very corner of his eye and sending him nearly to his knees. The blood soaking her shirt, blossoming outward all too quickly. Her hand gripping his so tightly, like he could hold her back from death.

He'd screamed himself raw for a medic. She'd died anyway.

After, he'd thrown up violently, gagging and choking into the rubble though his stomach was empty, dry heaves taking him to his hands and knees in the dirt. He'd scrubbed his hands raw trying to wash away her blood. He didn't cry right away after it was all over; just curled into his cot in the makeshift hospital and shook. Violently, incessantly, his teeth clattering together, he wrapped his arms around himself and curled into a ball and shivered. Until they sedated him.

The minute he could think rationally again, he swore he'd kill Saul Karath.

Then he cried.

He looks at the twisted, broken body at his feet and clenches his teeth.

The shadow of the flagship's bridge casts darkly along the deck, and Carth's boots are dipped wetly in gleaming red at the toes; he scrapes his hands along the waist of his armor to dry them, pushes his hair off of his forehead with a shove of his wrist.

Then he turns to look at Bastila, standing silent in the doorway, and at…

Revan. Revan.

"Is it true?"

His voice is rough and quiet, and Bastila looks away, unhappy. Revan regards him uneasily, casting wary glances between the two of them; the low lighting throws her features into hard definition.

"We'll talk later, Carth," Bastila says imploringly, and gestures at the hallway. "We need to go."

She's not wrong.

He glances one last time at Saul's lifeless form.

It doesn't feel half as good as it should, doesn't feel like closure. But cold satisfaction settles like a stone in the pit of his stomach nonetheless, and he walks away.

He put himself back together with promises of revenge; thoughts of killing Saul were the bits of tape with which he kept himself in one piece. He imagined the moment a thousand times, the words he'd say, the time he'd take.

In the end it amounted to a blade through the gut and you watched it burn.

It is not the most glamorous condemnation he'd had at his disposal; the most eloquent, the most articulate. But that was the heart of it, wasn't it? Saul stood safe on his precious ship and watched the world he'd once loved and sworn to protect as its surface caught on fire and turned the sky red.

You watched it burn.

For five years Saul's death has been the only thing driving him.

Now he's not sure what's left.

Revan sits in the cockpit of the Ebon Hawk, half-hidden in the slanted shadow of hyperspace; standing unnoticed in the doorway, Carth watches her.

He can see it now. The outline of the Dark Lord. He sees it in the sureness of her walk, the cut-glass line of her jaw, the cold command in her eyes when she wants things to go her way. He sees darkness there, but then, he sees darkness in himself, too. It's the shadow of blood on both their hands.

"I know you're there," she offers, staring into the tangle of blue on blue that is hyperspace, not turning. She's got a tumbler of something in her left hand, pale gold to match what's in the clear glass flask on the console.

Carth, only slightly sheepish, steps inside. "We should talk."

"What's there to talk about?" Revan finally lifts her head, looks at him. Her eyes are flat, unaffected; the jut of her chin is defiance at its clearest, and very familiar. Carth's answering smile is bitter and short.

"You being… who you are, for starters. Me killing Saul. Us. The Star Forge."

"All right," Revan concedes with the ghost of a wry smile, turning away. "What's there to say, then?"

Carth looks down at his hands, tucks them close to each other to hide the shadows. "I don't hate you."

"Thanks," she replies coolly, sounding suddenly very far away. She lifts her glass to her lips and doesn't drink, just lingers there.

"What do you want me to say?" Carth asks, irritation grating roughly at the edge of his voice. "You are… were…" He stops, shakes his head and presses a hand against his eyes, half-sitting on the edge of one of the consoles. "Hell, I don't know. You lost your memory, or part of it; that doesn't make you a new person."

From where he's standing he just barely catches the ragged edge of her grimace. "It gives me a chance to try and be one, though. In theory." She turns slowly to glance at him, her eyebrows lifting. "You know I didn't order that attack on Telos."

"You trained the man who did. And built the fleet he sent to destroy it." Resentment settles darkly at the back of Carth's throat as he answers, but he tamps it down, tucks it back out of the way. "I'm sorry," he adds, tacked on to soothe the deepening lines around her mouth as she regards him. "It's just. It's not easy. Looking past that."

"Bit of a bump in the road," Revan observes dryly, holding her drink up to the light before taking another lingering sip.

"But for what it's worth… I'm trying."

Her laugh escapes short and sharp, choked with something faintly sad. "I know."

It's not much of an apology on his part and not much of an acceptance on hers, but it's something like understanding, which is more than they've had. Progress.

"You didn't try to stop me," Carth says after the last star map, in transit. They're in the medbay, looking over Mission; she's sleeping, finally, the blaster burn on her arm patched up best they can manage.

Revan meets his eyes steadily across the medical cot, leaning back against the counter. Her arms are loosely folded over her chest, the lines of her expression unyielding. Stubborn, always.

When she doesn't answer, he clarifies, "Back on the Leviathan. You let me kill him, you didn't..."

She studies him a moment longer, the shadow of a sad smile creeping in at the edges of her eyes, thawing something cold there. "Wasn't my place. That was your decision."

"Yeah," he says, bitter on his tongue.

"Do you wish you hadn't?"

Carth shrugs. "I'm glad he's dead, if that's what you mean. But it's not…"

"What you expected."

"Got it in one," Carth says, trying for levity and failing miserably. "I always thought that would be it. Closure. You know? That would be the end of it. But I'm still here, there's still more to do, and I just don't… I just don't know."

"I'm going to kill Malak," Revan offers. Surprise snaps his eyes upwards, but Revan's not looking at him anymore. She's looking at her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers.

"Yeah, I figured," he says, lifting an eyebrow.

"You won't stop me," she clarifies.

"No," he agrees.

"Good." Revan steps toward the door, exhaling as she brushes past him. She stops just over the threshold, turns to look at him. "Then… maybe we can figure this out together," she says, and leaves before he can reply.

The Star Forge is coming down around them, and Malak is dead on the floor.

When he steps into the room, it is Telos again; smoke and fire and dying, so much dying, and that coppery tang on the air. There is that moment, that hitch; the catching of his breath in his throat, in his chest, the thundering of his heartbeat as he looks-

But this is the Star Forge, not Telos. And this is Revan, not Morgana, and she is standing, and she is alive.

"Here," Carth says, and catches her when she stumbles. Her fingers are clenched, white-knuckled, over her left side; in contrast, dark blood seeps out between them, and she clutches around his neck with the other arm as her legs seem to give way.

He isn't too late this time. He isn't.

"Hey, hey. Hey. I've got you," he says, turning to press his lips against her hair. Her fingers scrabble at the back of his shirt, curling in the fabric, her face buried in his neck so he can feel the heat of her ragged breathing. "I've got you."

"He's dead." Her voice is a hoarse rasp thinned by the noise around them so he barely catches it. There is blood everywhere, on her face and on his hands, slick red where they fumble to keep her upright, dark shadows on their skin in the failing light.

"I know. Come on."

He gets an arm around her waist and together they limp out of the wreckage, as sparks rain down around them like broken glass.

After it's all over, there's a Rakatan beach and a sunset, and Revan standing ankle-deep in the surf. He stuffs his hands in the pockets of his trousers and stays on the sand, taking in the dark shape of her against the sky, outlined in the shifting colors of twilight.

"I know you're there," she calls over the rolling sound of the waves, and he smiles a little, ducking his head.

"Hi," he says.

Revan turns, her smile lit at the corners with rare humor. "Hi."

"You look better," he offers. Then he stoops to grab at one of his boots, pulling it off and tossing it into the sand, then following it with the other. The sand is warm under the soles of his feet, soft and smooth.

"I am," she replies, reaching her hand out towards him. Barefoot, he trots into the shallow water to tangle his fingers with hers. The cold waters laps at his skin and the smell of salt fills his nostrils and Revan curls under his arm to nestle against his side and this is just… it's right.

"You all right?" he asks, dropping his cheek against the top of her head. These opportunities, this easy closeness, they're not to be taken for granted. He skims the slope of her back with his fingertips, the jut of her shoulder blades, the roughness of scarring on the back of her neck.

"I'm always all right," she murmurs back, quiet enough he has to lean in to catch it.

They stand silent for a long time, as the sun dips lower in the sky and bleeds red into the ocean, and Revan's fingers curl against his spine, holding him close.

"So what now?" she asks at length, twisting her head to look up at him. Dark bruising still spreads across her left cheekbone, and down the side of her neck, and the cut across the bridge of her nose is still healing, but she's here. She is.

"What?" he says.

"Now that Saul's dead. Malak is dead. Where do we go from here?"

Carth turns his eyes back to the sunset and shrugs. "I have no idea."

"Good." Revan laughs faintly. "Neither do I."

"I spent so much time chasing Saul, I… I never really thought about it. About 'after'."

"But here we are," she says.

"Yeah."

Beyond the energy fields lies the wreckage, dark and dismal and stretching into forever; Carth can almost taste it, the burnt ground and the rubble, even surrounded by the earthy air and the clean scent of restoration. The mossy ground presses under his feet and the field snaps and hisses and writhes pale blue, shielding them, but it's there.

Telos. Such as it is.

"I won," he says, humorously. "How about that."

"They're rebuilding," Revan offers, tracing the edge of the field in long, purposeful strides and leaving footprints in her wake. The restored segment is only about fifty paces across, and their sky is pressed down close. This is just a bubble, a dome. A shard of his homeworld taped back together.

But so is she. A fragment, patched up in something resembling herself. And so is he, really.

"It might not work," he says.

She shrugs.

"They asked me to stay," he offers after a lengthy pause. "The, um. The Republic reps on Citadel Station. They offered me a job."

Revan lifts an eyebrow. "And did you take it?"

"No, of course not, not without talking to you," he says with a little huff of laughter. "No, I… I just thought about it. I told them I needed some time."

"And?" She's looped around the edge now, is back at his side, just a few paces off.

Carth exhales through his teeth and turns back to the force field, the broken expanse of ground. "I can't," he says. "I've spent the last five years here. I never really left, after…"

"So what do you want to do?" she asks him, levelly.

He gives her a long look. "Walk away."

She doesn't miss a beat, just holds her hand out. He slides his into it, friction between their palms and the pads of their fingers, twisting around each other, gripping tight.

"Then let's go," she says.

And they do.

I can't escape this now
unless you show me how
(-Imagine Dragons, 'Demons')

Disclaimer: I still do not own KotOR.