The crucible of Geonosis had forged Sev. Delta’s malevolent sniper, he had emerged. They had emerged, when so many others had not. He wore his pride like he did his boots—scuffed and seasoned. There was no taking it off. There was also no forgetting. Feats of courage so incredible, any retelling would only diminish the memory. His hand on Scorch’s pauldron. Cover me. Men crying like tubies. Bug guts strung across his cuirass. Prowess and execution that would have made Vau turn and look.

He’d discovered he could bear it if he didn’t sleep. Something about pushing through. Pushing past the limits cleared his mind in a way that nothing else could. The blessed emptiness he could achieve felt better than the temporary relief of food, or alcohol, or stims. Feeling like he could inhabit his own skin was worth the physical distress. Bleary eyed and bad-tempered—a rancor in a suit of armor—as Scorch liked to say. Yeah, whatever.

EVEN

Special Operations Battalion Medical Center, Federal District, Coruscant, 0230, 385 days after Geonosis

If he’d flailed around like his life depended on it, it was only so he didn’t have to remove his bodysuit. If he’d stuck elbows and boots where they didn’t belong, the tinnie had  had it coming. Nobody touched Sev, and especially not when his favorite arm was hanging off his shoulder like limp bug splatter.

By the time they’d reached SOBMED, the pain was so severe he was holding back bile, jaw clamped shut. It was a good thing, too.

Fi had jabbed a needle in his thigh, twice—and the stinging pinch that usually put him in the mood to kill had barely been noticeable this time. Fi had slid his thumb along his leg to find the spot. That spot where the proprietary cocktail hit his bloodstream and slammed his eyes open again, coiling his muscles and sending warm shudders up under his ribcage. Kill juice—never felt better than when he was flying high with all parts perfectly primed. Until now.

The pain had lessened after a couple of those. Maybe Fi had given him something else, too. Then the awful tug and sshunkk of his shoulder sliding back into place. He'd made a noise to be embarrassed about later. Whatever Fi had done, though, the pain had dulled, enough for him to jog back to the speeder.

598 words

—-

In the final throes of last year’s GAR Ball on Coruscant, Shaak Ti had caught him with bits of food left on his plate after dinner.

“Colt, you didn’t finish your meal.” She’d said, tilting white lips, looking at him from under her lashes. He wanted to eat her when she looked at him that way: entirely unconcerned about his health.

“I did,” he’d told her, dragging his eyes back to the plate. “That’s for the fallen soldiers.”

And Colt regularly saved up his gett’se in the same manner—for times like this, when others floundered among the ruins, stumbling in the winds of change.

The place where Havoc had fallen remained unchanged, however. At least to the outside eye...

I’m 30 years old this year. Growing older is such a strange experience. It’s like being in a dream. Suddenly you realize your surroundings changed without you realizing it, and everything’s all different. You’re getting pulled along, whether you like it or not, through a dizzying array of scenes and memories. You’re stunned when you see yourself, and realize that you’ve been changing. Part of you wasn’t ready to get older.

Another part is magic, though, a dark magic of acceptance. Things that hurt never stop hurting, you've just become better at living with the pain. That’s what happens when you repeat the same mistakes. You learn, because you remember how you coped the last time. Ignore people who say to never make the same mistake twice. I don’t know what planet they’re from, but it’s not this one. No one tells you growing up that you won’t ever stop being afraid. You just learn to live with the fear. It becomes more familiar after many years of facing it, and once you can recognize your surroundings, that’s more than half the battle.

For a while, you’re just floating along, thinking you’ll be young forever. You have vague ideas of who you’re supposed to be and what you think you’ll do. But that’s as far from actually doing it as you can possibly get. Then you wake up and realize you're already there, and getting older every second. You rail against this realization for a while and waste more time doing so. All you wanted was freedom, and control over your life. Once you have it, it’s suddenly terrifying, because you don’t know what the hell to do with it. Figuring out how to grow up is like trying to teach someone else how to do something you have no clue about. You’re flailing madly in many directions, trying to grab onto something that feels solid.

At some point I stopped wondering so much about who I was supposed to be, and started paying attention to who I already was. Maybe there was something worthwhile there I could build upon. Once I stopped beating myself up for all my mistakes long enough, it seemed like it was ok to just be me. More than anything, I value creativity: the spirit of vision that finds a way around every obstacle. I don’t think there’s anything more important.

At some point I realized that I’d proven myself enough to know that I could handle things. Maybe I wouldn’t handle them like a pro, but I’d handle them, and I’d come through the other side.

were tangled together,

hopelessly.

I extracted the mess

vomited it up,

choking on the knots.

I sat and looked at it,

corners of my eyes

stinging

chest hard and heavy,

stomach knotted

mouth slammed shut.

I did not know

that all I am,

grew from a mass

IT’S EASIER TO DESCRIBE the absence of something, than it is to describe its presence.

The dark parts give shape to our images; without rendering they don’t look quite real.

When you understand that who you are is just as much about who you aren’t—and all the things you wish you hadn’t been, but couldn’t really help—that is when you know.

Trying to be perfect is like trying to sketch the shapes without the shadows; wondering why it looks stuffed—you have to color in the depth—and empty, but you have to take something out.

When you smudge your life in shadows, or you cut things out and sew things shut, even though you don’t know how—you’re doing it. You’re looking, and something is looking back at you.

You know, to make sure they don’t look like O’s. They end up looking like tiny ringed planets, tilted on their sides. And sometimes like the Greek letter Phi. God forbid I draw the line horizontally, making them into faces with broad-brimmed hats. However I make them, they become a little portal that transports me directly into a dark barracks room, standing as stiffly as a sleep-deprived kid in an ill-fitting uniform can stand, eyes squinting in the light coming from the doorway.

I am quite sure I remember the door being open. Or maybe the door had been removed. I was counting the seconds, staring at the logbook, trying not to make any mistakes with my ink-imposed hourly notations. Many of them contained zeros—all of which I crossed diagonally.

I hoped that Chief would not come down the hall and lay into me about god-knows-what, like a wolf lays into its dinner.