Private The Darkside Shall set us Free

[Damsy Callat]

The crackle of eggs as they cooked around their edges.

Pockets of fat popping off bacon strips like sap in the middle of a bonfire.

Slight pangs of bare feet against the cabin's durasteel flooring.

Idris threw a hand towel over his shoulder and turned away from the range. Surely enough, Damsy had wandered out of the guestroom down the hall into the kitchen. "Ah! Look at that; Sleeping Beauty rises!" he teased. It wasn't all too late, though the hour had strayed into brunch territory, but he knew she was in the habit of rising early. It was one of the unbreakable eggs than military service saw you off with, of which both of them were. "An' I thought you said sharks don't sleep."

Damsy opened her mouth but nothing came out. She left her jaw hanging for a beat, then closed it, and furrowed her brow. In search of a comeback? It wasn't like her to lose her wits, but she had been through a lot on Coruscant over a last few days. He was just fuzzy with the details.

"'Ey, that's a joke," he said, hoping to afford her some calm.

Instead, the seas in her eyes rippled. Shiny white surf began to break the surface. Her face contorted further, from pure confusion to bitter frustration.

"Callat? Are you…?" Reaching behind himself, the other veteran switched off the burners before crossing the floor to Damsy.

She glanced up at him as he moved, muttering something in a tongue he didn't even recognize.

He furrowed his own brow. "I can't…" he began, but thought better than to finish. What she needed was at the very least a hug, not a conformation that he couldn't understand her, that she had forgotten how to speak Basic. "It-it's okay."

More foreign words came in strings pulled from her lungs and slung over his shoulder. Hands calloused more from toting a rake and trowel than a blaster pet down her back all the while. He hadn't seen this in either of the fields he had worked, battle nor barnyard, but another one of those unbreakable eggs was being able to tell traumatic stress whenever you saw, or heard, or didn't hear it.

"We'll figure it out."

The tsunami lapped onto land, water displaced from her tear ducts down his shirt.

 

[Damsy Callat]

. . .​

The sun would have baked mudcracks into the topsoil was there not a full layer of clover growing in between the rows of interplanted crops. Thanks to it, the ground was still moist months into the dry season, and wandering the farm to harvest was like walking along a continuous strip of cumulus cloud.

So, the sun baked its love into Idris' back instead. And he heard an extra rustling of foliage that wasn't him pulling a round fruit away from a bush's flowered shoot. When he glanced up, déjà vu struck:

Damsy was within this new living hallway, had stopped as soon as he looked, but this time she was smiling.

He smiled back then. After straightening up, he tossed his spoil to her. "Feelin' any better?" he asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

Damsy rose a knee to shine the fruit's skin on her pant leg and replied, "Matters if ya can grok me now or not."

"Yeah yeah," he said, nodding. "I gotcha." He kicked some fallen leaves under the small canopy. "You wanna talk about it?"

A crunch filled the air before Damsy's voice came again. "I was speaking Kaminoan," she began as she chewed. "'Aven't done that in a while. An' I've neva forgotten my Basic 'fore."

"Stressed out?"

Swallowing, she scoffed. "Hella." Her eyes drifted over the understory stretching out to their right. It was like its own sea blooming green with algae. "I just can't remember about what..."

"Something happened at the Reef."

Her gaze returned to the farmer, back to looking surprised.

"I don't know what, just that you rocked up to the guest barracks outta your mind. I put in for some overdue leave and here we are." Idris rose a brow. "I had hoped you could share some insight soon as we got some distance from the Core. Do-do you know why you left the Underworld?"

Damsy took a moment. Finally, her shoulder shrugged. "I just 'adta—"

"Nu buti nenx uzpra j'us (I'm not asking you)."

The ur-Kittât cut through the warm afternoon air like a frigid butter knife, fast enough to stir up a gust. Damsy felt goosebumps domino down her arms, but not only from the sudden wind chill. A consciousness bubbled up in her head and spilled down her neck to settle in her voicebox. "Mes buti isdavy (We were betrayed)," Syreni answered.

Idris didn't as much start. He might have only had a very short stint as a Jedi, but despite it—and maybe even because of it—he had been following their rival Code the rest of his life. His friend's dark side was nothing to him when he had gotten so used to staring into the abyss that was the capital D Darkside. "Sas kuris (By who)?" he asked.

Her lips curdled against her face. "Re Xaari (Our Apprentice)."

His face deformed to, confused. Damsy had told him that she drew a hard line at teaching anyone else to explore the grey areas and blurred lines of the Force that she was exploring. Syreni might have a different plan, but since Damsy was in control of their body most often, it was unlikely the first would have had time to execute. Instead, there was one likely correction, which he made: "Tu'iea su'us (Your son)?"

Arlo Renard ? That couldn't be true, could it?

Syreni shook her head, prompting Idris to furrow his brow, until she stumbled back. Not Syreni. Damsy.

He lurched forward to catch her elbows and keep her from retreating further. "You need to stop fighting it."

"B-but she's Sith, Id—"

"That don't mean bad," he interrupted as sharply as he had first uttered ur-Kittât. "Let 'er back in."

"D-Dag says—" Her eyes widened and she writhed, trying to get away.

But he held fast like a snake with a locked jaw straight from her own personal Eden. "Tave Jidai (The Jedi)—"

Now it was Idris' turn to be interrupted. A forceful exhale cut his sentence short as Damsy's knee dove up under his rib cage.

 

[Damsy Callat]

As he doubled over, she was able to tear away from his grasp and step back. "Don't speak that chit," Damsy spat.

A few silent moments for which his chest heaved up and down passed. Idris glanced up from bracing on his knees. "The irony o' that lost on you or what?"

"Arisso taught me so I could reconnect with my heritage—"

A laugh cut Damsy off. It graded into a coughing fit as Idris straightened up. "Heritage?" he echoed once he had stopped heaving. "Your heritage isn't just words an' grammar; it's..." he rose a hand to tap a few fingers to his temple, "her too."

"No," Damsy whispered, taking another small step away from him and shaking her head.

Idris nodded. "Yes. Ya jus' don't like her."

"Of course I don't! I didn't ask for this!"

"She didn't either!" he countered. "Have you ever thought that the only reason she's caused you nothin' but trouble is because you've been nothin' but bad to her?" He began counting on his fingers. "You've vilified her, suppressed her, used her. And most importantly, whether or not you're ready to admit it of not, she and you are one and the same, so you've really been doing that all to," he pointed at her, "you."

Silence fell between them again. Damsy looked down at the dirt. Idris brought his hand to his nape and rubbed out an itch. When he spoke again, looking out over his field rather than at her, his voice was even and bittersweet. "Damsy, I'm just tryna help you."

She shuffled her boots. "...What were you gonna say?"

He paused to wet his lips, then spoke to every leaf under his gaze. "Tave Jidai run nzaenr kuris mes buti (The Jedi don't know who we are)."

Damsy hummed. It didn't sound either agreeable or disagreeable. Instead, simple acknowledgement.

"We're Sith," he continued. "We recognize that the Galaxy will always be in turmoil, and that power and passion are the only ways we may hope to survive and save others. That's all."

 

[Damsy Callat]

"Is it?" Damsy asked after a beat, curious as she spoke soft and sidestepped towards her friend.

It was his turn to hum out, stanch assent this time. "At our core, we're just a religion worshipping the Force like the Jedi." He rose his hands, palms open to the sky but held in close to his chest, a gesture of reverence. "Followin' a set o' tenants tryin' to live well." One by one, his fingers curled into his palms. The fists founds their ways into the pockets of his dungarees. "None of this cosmic struggle poodoo."

Damsy nodded wordlessly.

"Now the Galaxy'll never be rid of it." Finally, he looked over at her. "And we'll—you and me we—will never be safe. But we can't give up on who we are."

Another nod from the humanoid Siren. "That's what you've done your whole career," she mused.

"My whole life," he corrected gently, forlornly. "From Kesh to Voss to Kashyyyk. Mom recited the Sith Code to me so much in that first year of my life that I think my first words were 'Peace is a lie'." A sudden chuckle punctuated his sentence. "When I was taken to train, super stereotypical Jedi young, my parents gave their full blessin'. They were religious Sith but not Sith imperials, y'know? Well, when my master-to-be found out..."

Damsy knit her brow as she watched his adam's apple bob up and down his throat. She remained silent.

One hand emerged from his pockets. With the back of it, he wiped under his nose. Tilting his head back towards the sky, he might have convinced himself that his grief was nothing but an imaginary bloody nose, but Damsy could smell the trace amount of saline wafting in the air. "Let's just say that peace is a lie after all." His face floated back level. "The strongest survives. I still don't know how a barely pubescent kid beat out a seasoned consular, but I'm here now and I choose ta pay that forward. By growing good food, by fighting for those who can't themselves, by caring." Again, he glanced at Damsy, and smiled. "Surviving's best played as a co-op sport, don'tcha know?"

She outstretched a hand for his shoulder.

"Aw, don't feel bad," he said, reading her mind. "This ain't about me." His hand slid over her to gently guide it off of his shoulder. "I dodged a blaster bolt. I'm able to keep my chit under wraps since I'm not Sensitive anymore. But you?" He whistled. "You keep gettin' grazed."

Damsy pursed her lips and sighed. Did she ever. "I can't 'elp it," she said defeatedly. "I can't 'ide it." She could, of course, try, but the truth always came out, like it had recently, somehow, on Coruscant.

"Oh no, I know. You burn through those fancy amulets like no one's business. You haven't build a lightsaber yet because you bleed every kyber you touch."

"I-I haven't told anyone that."

Now Idris was the one to sigh. "I guessed," he admitted. "That's how it was for me. It wasn't much, just a tint of red, but enough for Pae to notice."

"So what do I do?"

 

[Damsy Callat]

"I told you," he answered calmly. "Stop fighting it. That's the only way to regain Syreni's trust." He turned to her. "I know you don't want to, but you gotta."

Damsy pursed her lips and repeated, "But what do I do?"

Idris offered a shy sideways smile. "Commit. Go to Kesh. The Takara Mountians. There's the ruins of a Sith temple up there, built around an even older ship skeleton. Get yourself a Lignan crystal. And bleed the hell into it."

After raising a hand to slide over her temple, and sighing, she pivoted to wander away a few steps. "You right," she said matter-of-factly. "I don't like it."

"It's not too different from what you've been trying to convince everyone of for the past few years, if you think about it." When Damsy faced back to him, he was kicking his rounded toe into the ground. Her brow furrowed again. He stood with the clod, shaking his palm until it was at the center. "You were born by Alchemy, right? It's not just part of you, it is you. You'd die withou—I'm preachin' to the choir." He motioned very generally to her right hand. "Your ring thing can filter light out of the spectrum that is your aura, but just lowercase l, not uppercase." He bent to dip through the thin but full layer of vegetative cover and grab a loose dirt clod from the ground. He took the clod in between his other hand's pointer and index fingers, then stood. He held it up to her. "Your chroma's still Dark. Leaves on the surface, soil beneath."

"I thought...I thought that meant I could control it instead."

A shake of the head then. "I'm not saying you can't bloom; I am saying that you can't ignore the foundation either. That's not the Sith way. Our power, your power, needs to be unbridled. Anger, fear, pride, pain, but intense doesn't have to victimize. Neither you or others. It only has to realize." Tossing away the clod, he dusted off his hands in the air. in front of him. "Forget Jedi judgements. Lean into yourself."

Damsy was quiet, and mostly still, for so long that Idris stooped back to work, content to let her process his advice. Finally, when he picked up his harvest pail to move down the cropline, she mentioned, "I wonder something, Id."

He stopped and glanced up at her. "Yeah?"

"You fought 'gainst legions of the extremist, power-'ungry type o' Sith. ...Did that ever make you angry?"

"It made me angrier than a Jedi could ever realize." With that, he finished his move: shuffle, resettle. "But it also gave me the strength to keep fightin' the good fight against the badduns."

Damsy straightened her neck, squared her shoulders. She breathed out through her nose. Syreni was silent, though not quite at peace. If she was, she'd be a paradox. Rather, the pond of her emotions wasn't entirely calm. The gentle ripples marring it surface, Damsy was almost loathe to realize, were the buds of happiness—still passion, just orders of magnitude quieter than the stereotypical kind that leveled landscapes and yoked half of the Galaxy time and time again.

Idris spoke aloud; Syreni echoed in her shared mind:

"The Darkside shall set us free."