Private What Was Left Behind

[Zesiro]

The worst of the chaos had passed by the time Zesiro reached the damaged district of Carida, but the aftermath clung to the air like a second atmosphere. Fires had been extinguished, yet the scent of smoke lingered beneath the drifting haze of dust that turned the late afternoon sunlight into muted gold. The frantic shouting of emergency teams had faded into something quieter and heavier, the kind of silence that followed only after adrenaline had burned itself out and people kept moving because stopping would mean feeling everything at once.

Cleanup crews worked with the slow, exhausted determination of those who had already seen more than they could process. Scorched walls, fractured transparisteel, makeshift medical stations assembled from cargo crates, the district bore all the familiar signs of catastrophe. Sections of roadway had peeled apart, exposing conduits and twisted support beams, and somewhere farther down the avenue, a loader groaned as workers tried to clear a buried transit entrance. The entire place felt bruised.

Zesiro moved through it with measured calm, dressed not for ceremony but for work: dark, fitted trousers tucked into dust-coated boots, a structured charcoal jacket reinforced at the shoulders, lighter combat weave beneath. The clean lines of her clothing suggested professionalism, but the way she wore them, practical, unadorned, unselfconscious, made her look less like nobility and more like someone accustomed to walking directly into difficult situations. A datapad rested at her hip beside a compact utility kit, and her blonde hair had been pulled back simply to keep it out of the drifting grit.

Her blue eyes swept over the exhausted crews and displaced civilians gathered beneath temporary shelters. Some sat wrapped in blankets, staring at nothing. Others spoke quietly with medics or engineers. The district carried that strange, muted stillness shared trauma always left behind, where even conversation felt like an intrusion on the weight of what had happened.

And then she saw him.

Not because he stood out, in truth, it was the opposite. He blended into the scene with the unremarkable ease of someone used to being overlooked: lean, without looking fragile, dressed in worn, practical layers marked with dust and ash, moving with the steady rhythm of a relief worker who had been at this for hours. But there was something about the way he worked that immediately drew her attention.

Nothing rushed. Nothing careless.

He adjusted a blanket over one of the covered bodies with quiet precision, smoothing the fabric as though it mattered that the dead be treated gently. Personal belongings were gathered separately instead of tossed into general recovery crates. Identification tags rested near a datapad alongside handwritten notes rather than sterile numerical markers.

It wasn't a procedure. It was care.

Zesiro slowed, watching him through the drifting haze of dust and late sunlight, her expression softening into something thoughtful. Around him, the district still looked exhausted and fractured, but he moved with the patient reverence of someone who believed dignity did not end with breath, someone who refused to let the dead become just another part of the debris.

That alone caught her.

And so, instead of continuing toward the command shelters ahead, Zesiro quietly altered her course, drawn toward the one person in the ruins who seemed to understand that compassion was not a resource to be rationed.

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

Where chaos left people dead and displaced, Malach was sure to follow.

He'd had a few people who were put off by him call him things like undertaker, reaper, death bringer, and other such names. For some people, this was their way of grieving, lashing out at others with irrational claims. He recognized that, and he never scolded anyone for saying those things to him. Words could not hurt him.

On Carida, he was dealing with the aftermath of another careless event. No natural disaster, but an attack that killed senselessly. That kind of thing did anger him. The people that threw away lives so senselessly, well, they should replace the dead bodies with their own. They didn't deserve the lives that they were allowed to live. This was especially true as he gently covered up the body of a child, delicately smoothing the blanket over her before taking the stuffed lizard that had been in her hand and placing it in his pack.

He collected a strand of hair from her and placed it in a vial. When he got back to his ship, he would have it analyzed and entered into his database of the dead. Picking up his journal, he quietly made notes with a pencil on the parchment. It was a true journal, not a device, but something actually bearing the marks of his hand. He felt that the deceased were owed that level of reverance. No sterile numbers on a device, but a name and description carefully cataloged.

As he did this, he became aware of a signature in the Force that had taken notice of him. He could feel the focus being placed upon him. He didn't know who it was. He didn't know why they wanted, but he didn't want their interest. It would just hamper what he was doing. It would slow him down.

So, he ignored it, grabbed his things and moved to the next body, a young woman with a large portion of her body missing. He knelt down beside her and gently lay his hand upon her head, reaching into the Force to commune with her and her assure her that she could rest. She was troubled, afraid for her children who were elsewhere when she had died. But he assured her that they were not among the dead and that she could move on, and soon enough she did.

He slid his hand down her face to quietly close her eyes, and then reached for a blanket to proceed with carefully covering her up from the elements until they could bury or cremated her, whatever the people on Carida did with their dead.

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro slowed several meters away and came to a stop, not because the scene disturbed her; disturbance implied unfamiliarity, and there was very little about death, grief, or the hollowed-out quiet that followed catastrophe that could unsettle her anymore, but because there was something so deeply intimate in the way the man worked that stepping closer without thought felt almost like an intrusion. So she remained still for a moment, letting the dust settle around her boots while she watched him with the quiet respect one offered to a private ritual.

The child caught her attention first. Not the small, still shape beneath the blanket, but the care with which he tended to them: the gentle smoothing of the fabric, the deliberate preservation of the toy rather than discarding it with the debris, the way he collected a strand of hair not with clinical detachment but with a reverence that suggested he understood the weight of what he was holding. None of it resembled official procedure. No relief organization would spend this much time on each individual casualty in a disaster of this scale.

And yet he did.

Her gaze drifted to the journal beside him, real parchment, real graphite, the kind of deliberate handwriting that pressed meaning into paper as though permanence mattered more than efficiency. Perhaps to him, it did.

When he moved to the next victim, Zesiro noticed the subtle shift in the air around him before she fully understood what she was seeing. It wasn't power displayed openly, nothing dramatic or forceful. It was quieter than that, the Force moving around him like grief given shape, gentle and unbearably heavy, as though every life he touched left an imprint he refused to ignore. And when he closed the woman's eyes with that same careful tenderness, Zesiro finally understood.

He wasn't cataloging the dead. He was mourning them. Every single one.

Something in her chest tightened with a quiet, unexpected ache. Most people eventually learned to distance themselves from tragedy; they had to. Officials reduced casualties to numbers because the alternative was unbearable. Soldiers compartmentalized. Governments memorialized and moved forward. Entire systems survived by learning how not to feel too much at once.

But this man had done the opposite. He had allowed himself to feel everything. And somehow he was still standing.

Zesiro stepped forward then, slow enough not to startle him, her boots crunching softly through dust and fractured debris. She did not approach like an official inspecting a scene, nor like someone seeking to interfere or redirect him. She approached simply as a woman drawn toward something painfully, profoundly human.

"You speak to them," she said quietly once she was close enough that he would not need to raise his voice. The words held no accusation, no disbelief, only recognition. Her blue eyes drifted briefly toward the covered woman before returning to him, steady and unguarded in a way she rarely allowed herself to be. "And they answer."

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

The fact that she didn't leave bothered him. It meant she was going to say or do something and he didn't want her to. He didn't like to be disturbed. If anything, he didn't like dealing with the living unless he was assisting something in dealing with grief or difficulty. Helping people. That's what he was good at. But she just wanted to talk about what he was doing, which interrupted him.

"They don't all move on immediately," he said as he finished covering the woman up and took a strand of hair, careful to keep the root intact, to catalogue.

The hair went into a vial, and into a vial storage container in his pack. Then he picked up his journal and catalogued, once more, everything he could about the deceased. He knew she had children that lived in the same city, so he made sure to note that down. If he could track them down before he left, he would be sure to do so and help them to deal with the grief of losing their mother. She hadn't mentioned a husband, so he suspected she was a single parent, which would make it all the harder for the children.

He finished writing and snapped the book closed, still not looking at the woman that spoke. It wasn't necessary. Everything he needed to know about her was written in the Force. She bore the signatures of the dead.

"You have blood on your hands. Leave me."

The traces of her past still lingered about her as they did on everyone who took a life. Most people couldn't detect it. Many people didn't care. But he cared and he could detect it. She had taken more than one life in her time. That made her a killer. He didn't like to be around killers and he wanted her to leave, but instead of pushing further, he grabbed his things and moved on down the street in search of the next body.

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

The accusation settled between them without provoking the reaction many people might have expected.

Zesiro's gaze lowered briefly as he spoke of blood on her hands. There was no denial waiting there, no instinctive defense. She had taken lives. Some in service. Some in protection. Some because circumstances had left no alternative she could live with. The distinction mattered to her, though she suspected it mattered very little to him.

"You're not wrong," she said quietly.

There was no bitterness in the admission. Only acceptance.

When he gathered his belongings and moved away, she found herself respecting the dismissal more than resenting it. Whatever compelled him to do this work was genuine, and she had no desire to become another distraction pulling him away from it. She had intended to leave him to his task and return to her own responsibilities within the district.

The decision lasted only a few seconds.

Movement erupted from the entrance of a damaged building farther down the street as a child suddenly appeared, sprinting through the dust and debris with the desperate determination that only grief seemed capable of producing. Tears streaked a face already marked by exhaustion and dirt, and the direction of their flight made the destination obvious almost immediately. They were running toward Malach.

Zesiro's eyes shifted toward the covered bodies he had been tending, and understanding arrived with uncomfortable speed. Whether the woman had been their mother or another loved one hardly mattered. The child had seen enough to know where the answers would be found.

Behind them came an Imperial agent.

The man was shouting something as he forced his way through the wreckage in pursuit, closing the distance with far more urgency than the situation warranted. Perhaps there was an explanation. Perhaps there were orders. Zesiro found she did not particularly care.

The child passed her first.

The agent followed only moments later.

Years spent protecting presidents and dignitaries had ingrained certain responses so deeply that they no longer required conscious thought. By the time the Imperial realized she had stepped into his path, it was already too late. He either expected her to move aside or assumed he could push through her. Instead, he collided directly with her shoulder, and the instant the impact came, she caught his arm, pivoted with practiced precision, and redirected every bit of his forward momentum into the ground.

The throw was clean, efficient, and entirely unceremonious.

One moment, he was charging forward. The next thing, he was slammed into the dust-coated pavement hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

Zesiro released him immediately and took a single step back, settling into a balanced stance that looked almost casual to an untrained observer. There was no aggression in her posture, no desire to continue the confrontation beyond what had already been necessary. Yet there was an unmistakable certainty about her, the quiet confidence of someone who had spent years placing herself between danger and the people under her protection.

Her blue eyes remained fixed on the Imperial as he struggled to recover.

"Stay where you are."

The words were delivered calmly, almost conversationally, but there was no mistaking them for a request.

Behind her, the child continued toward Malach uninterrupted, and for the moment, that was the only outcome Zesiro cared about.

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

For once it seemed as if someone would listen to him when he said he wanted to be left alone. Most didn't. It was important, his work. Nobody else would do it. Nobody else cared enough except those who had lost, and they truly only cared about those they had lost, not all of the dead. Nobody cared about all the dead except for him. Nobody but him.

It was a lonely work, cataloguing everyone that he could. All the time. One world to the next. Put them at peace, take notes, identify if possible, collect dna for his database, notify next of kin if they didn't know. Help them grieve if needed. It was all he had done for years. It was all he knew.

But his work was still interrupted.

He felt it even before the child appeared and stopped walking away from the woman. Instead, he turned around just in time to see the child come running. Quick visual examination told him it was the child of the deceased woman he had just tended to. Why they were there became evident as an Imperial officer appeared behind them, clearly trying to chase the child down. Why didn't matter to him. They were harassing a child whose mother lay dead in the street and that was enough to anger him.

The woman that had spoken to him didn't stop the child. The young girl raced onward until Malach opened his arms and crouched down to catch her with his body. It wasn't the first time he had done this. It wouldn't be the last.

What did surprise him was that the woman, the one he had wanted to go away, stopped the officer. With force. The man was planted into the ground with enough force that he knew it was going to hurt. That didn't bother him. The man had been chasing a child, and he didn't trust Imperials. They tended to be a prominent cause for his work. They tended to kill beyond the battlefield as well.

"It's alright," he said to the girl as he wrapped her in his arms and held her close.

His eyes didn't leave the woman. What would she do? She'd killed. Would she kill him?

"I spoke with your mother. She wants you to be brave and to go to your grandparents. They'll take care of you."

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

The Imperial groaned as he tried to push himself upright. Zesiro did not give him the opportunity.

The moment his palms found the dust-coated pavement, she stepped forward and seized his wrist, twisting his arm behind his back with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this more times than she cared to count. There was nothing heated in the movement, no anger, no satisfaction, only the clean, precise application of a skill honed through years of protecting a president in a galaxy that rarely offered second chances. Most confrontations, she had learned, were won long before a weapon ever left its holster. Positioning. Timing. Control. Ending a situation before it could become worse.

The man protested immediately. She ignored him.

A set of binders slid from a utility pouch at her belt, and despite the Imperial's curses, they clicked shut around his wrists with finality. Only then did she ease the pressure enough for him to breathe without strain.

"You chased a grieving child through an active recovery zone," she said, her voice calm and unyielding. "Whatever explanation you think justifies that can be provided to someone else."

Her gaze lifted beyond him. One of the allied security personnel had already noticed the commotion and was making their way over. Zesiro raised a hand, signaling them forward. The trooper arrived moments later, and she handed the situation off with the same composed clarity she used for everything else.

"He interfered with civilian recovery operations and attempted to pursue a minor through a casualty site," she said evenly. "Take him into custody and let command decide what they wish to do with him."

The trooper nodded. The prisoner protested. Zesiro had already stopped listening. Her attention had drifted back toward the child. Toward Malach.

The girl had buried herself against him with the desperate, instinctive cling of someone whose world had just collapsed inward. It was a sight Zesiro had witnessed more times than she wished to remember, and yet it never became easier, perhaps because the day it did become easy would be the day she needed to worry about what she had turned into.

As Malach relayed the mother's final wishes, Zesiro looked away for a moment, granting the child what little privacy remained in a place like this. The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the suspended dust, turning the ruined street into a muted wash of gold that felt almost painfully gentle against the devastation surrounding them.

When she finally looked back, her eyes settled briefly on the covered form of the woman before returning to Malach. "You knew where she needed to go before she ever reached you." The observation was quiet, not suspicious, not challenging, simply true.

A few minutes earlier, he had wanted her gone. Perhaps he still did. But as she watched him now, holding together the fragile pieces of a life that had just been shattered, something in her shifted. She found herself less inclined to leave than before, not out of curiosity or duty, but because she could not quite reconcile how a man could carry so much grief and still find room for this kind of gentleness.

And that, more than anything else she had seen today, was what held her in place.

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

It did surprise him when she resolved it without actually killing the man. He seemed fine, albeit angry when he was hauled off by one of the nearby security personnel. Served him right for harassing the girl. They wouldn't kill him for it. In truth, he doubted they would even discipline him. The whole thing was performative once he was hauled away. Imperials didn't actually care about citizens.

The woman, though, seemed to care.

It still wasn't enough to make him want her around.

He also didn't respond to what she said, but turned his attention back to the young girl that was crying into him, clinging on for dear life. He'd done it a thousand times or more. It never got easier. He'd seen everything. Dealt with everything. Nothing hurt worse than seeing others in the throes of their grief. Especially when he saw himself in them.

He closed his eyes and gently lay his head upon the child's, words uttering from his lips in a breathy, quiet song.

"The stars don't keep the ones we love,
They only hold their light,
So when you miss them, close your eyes,
And feel them in the night.

Though hands may part and roads may bend,
No love is ever gone,
For every heart they touched will help
Their song keep carrying on."

A hand gently stroked the child's back and after a moment she stepped away from him, rubbing her hand at her eye and stifling further cries behind hiccups. He brushed away some of her tears with a gentle hand.

"Be strong, little one. Do you know where your grandparents live?"

The girl nodded.

"Can you get there on your own?"

She nodded again.

"That's good. Go ahead and head there. I'm sure they'll be glad to see you. You are loved, little one."

The girl rubbed her eyes once more and nodded before she turned and began to walk away from him. She walked past the woman without saying anything. He suspected she wouldn't talk for a time. It was common among children dealing with tragedy. Again, he knew from experience.

Standing, he watched her until she was gone, and then looked at the woman again.

"What is it you want?"

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro remained silent while he comforted the child, letting the soft, steady cadence of the song settle into the dust-filled air. The gentleness of it felt almost out of place amid ruined buildings and covered bodies, yet she watched the girl's grief loosen its grip by degrees, not vanish, never that, but ease enough for her to breathe through it. There was no technique in what he was doing, no performance, no attempt to fix what could not be fixed. Only presence. Only the kind of quiet steadiness that asked for nothing and offered everything it could.

When the child finally departed, Zesiro's eyes followed her until she disappeared into the fractured streets beyond. Only then did she return her attention to Malach.

His question was direct. Fair, too. Most people wanted something: information, influence, assistance, or validation. The galaxy had conditioned everyone to expect a transaction eventually. For a moment, she considered the answer, then exhaled softly.

"Nothing."

The word left her before she could dress it in diplomacy or distance. Her gaze drifted briefly toward the bodies he had tended, then back to him. "I thought I wanted to understand what you were doing," she said, a faint, tired smile touching her lips. "But I think I understood that part almost immediately."

The late afternoon light caught the suspended dust between them, softening the devastation without concealing it.

"What I don't understand is how you continue."

There was no challenge in the question, no skepticism, only genuine curiosity. "I've spent enough years around loss to know what it does to people. Most learn to distance themselves from it. They build walls. Procedures. Categories. Entire systems exist to create enough separation that people can keep functioning." Her eyes settled on the journal tucked among his belongings. "You seem to have done the opposite."

The observation lingered between them before she continued, her voice quieter now.

"You remember them. You carry them. You mourn strangers as if they were family." Her expression softened, touched by something she rarely allowed to surface. "And somehow that hasn't broken you."

Perhaps it had. Perhaps she simply wasn't seeing the fractures.

"I wasn't planning on stopping the Imperial because I wanted your attention," she said after a moment. "I stopped him because he was chasing a child who had every right to reach her mother." The statement was simple, unadorned, honest. "After that..." Her shoulders rose and fell in a small, almost weary shrug. "I suppose I stayed because people who still choose kindness after seeing this much suffering have become surprisingly rare."

For the first time since approaching him, there was no careful analysis behind her eyes, no guarded assessment, only truth.

"So if you're asking what I want, the answer is nothing." A brief pause followed, softer than the silence before. "Though I wouldn't object to understanding you a little better."

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

She spoke far longer than he had anticipated she would. It wasn't a demand, not for information or things. It was an acknowledgement that she didn't understand what she was doing, even though she thought that she did. Nobody ever did. Plenty of people pretended to, usually the ones that initially tried to keep him away, but acquiesced when he explained. They thought they understood, but they only saw the superficial practice that was evident by what their eyes saw him doing. They didn't have the capability of delving into the depths of it.

"Broken people can help other broken people. People who break people have a hard time understanding that, though."

This level of interrogation was starting to go beyond what he was accustomed to. Further, it was starting to branch towards personal territory, which was somewhere he didn't want it to go.

"I'm sure the girl appreciated you stopping her harasser."

He reached down and plucked his bag from the ground, tossing it over his shoulder. It didn't mean much to him that she'd done it. He knew she hadn't done it for his sake, especially since the man was interested in the girl, not him. If she hadn't dealt with him, he would have anyway. People like that had to be pushed back against. Since the child was just running because of her grief, hadn't done any wrong, he had no reason for chasing her anyway.

Turning around, he started walking again, knowing full well that she was going to follow him because what he was doing had sparked a level of curiosity in her that wasn't going to be sated by the simple words he'd offered. She had to know more and for that she had to follow. He breathed a sigh as he moved, looking for the next body in the long trail of destruction that had been left behind by the battle. Somewhere amongst the debris was another soul crying out to him. He just had to find it.

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

The response earned the faintest narrowing of Zesiro's eyes, not from offense but from thought, the phrase people who break people settling somewhere heavy in the back of her mind. She could have argued that life was rarely so simple, that there was a difference between violence committed for cruelty and violence committed because someone else had left no alternative, that protection itself sometimes required harm. But she let the observation stand between them unanswered, perhaps because she suspected neither of them would change the other's mind, or perhaps because some part of her wondered whether he was speaking from experience rather than judgment.

When he lifted the bag onto his shoulder and began walking again, she watched him for a moment before falling into step several paces behind, careful not to crowd him. If he disliked company as much as he seemed to, forcing herself into his immediate space would accomplish nothing except ensuring he remained irritated.

"The girl appreciated it," she said after a moment, her tone even. "Though I suspect she will remember you more than she remembers me." There was no resentment in the statement; if anything, a faint thread of amusement softened it.

Her gaze drifted across the damaged district as they walked. Recovery crews moved through the ruins with the weary determination of people who had long since run out of adrenaline, some lifting debris, others documenting damage, medics weaving between temporary shelters to check on those who remained. It was a scene she had witnessed countless times throughout her life, yet seeing it now, in proximity to him, made it feel strangely different, less abstract, more human, as though the scale of the tragedy had narrowed into something she could feel rather than simply assess.

For years, she had been trained to evaluate situations through metrics and consequences: casualties, resources, infrastructure, stability. Necessary perspectives, certainly, but ones that inevitably reduced suffering into categories large enough to manage. Malach appeared incapable, or perhaps unwilling, to do that.

"You know," she said thoughtfully as she stepped over a fractured section of pavement, "most people I've met who spend their lives around death eventually become numb to it. Not because they're cruel, but because they have to survive somehow." Her eyes drifted toward him, studying the quiet gravity in his posture. "You seem to have chosen a different solution."

The words were quieter than before, less a question than a realization slowly taking shape.

"I did leave you to your work. At least, I intended to. The child changed that." She brushed dust from her sleeve, a faint smile touching her lips. "Truthfully, I don't think curiosity is quite the right word anymore."

The admission came with surprising honesty, unguarded in a way she rarely allowed herself to be.

"I think I'm trying to understand whether what you're doing is possible," she continued, her gaze settling ahead on the long trail of destruction stretching through the district. "Whether a person can care that much and somehow remain whole enough to keep doing it tomorrow."

For a moment, she considered the irony of her own words, then allowed herself a small shake of the head.

"Then again," she said softly, "perhaps asking whether either of us is whole is the wrong question."

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

"She'll remember neither of us," he said without looking back. "What she'll remember is the loss and she'll fill the hole with her grandparents."

She really didn't want to give up on following him. Most people had gotten bored of him by this point. He said little, and what he did say didn't really answer their questions. Many got frustrated by that and left him be. He didn't answer questions that way for that reason, but it was a boon. The real reason was that he didn't want to talk. He didn't like it. He didn't like conversations and he didn't like being around people, for the most part. The only time he did was when he was helping because then he could blend in without people bothering him. The only other time he accepted it was when he needed to comfort someone who was having trouble letting go. He could not make them let go, but he could lend an ear and listen. Often just that was enough for them to move to the next stage of the grief cycle.

The conversation was persistent. She mentioned that most people became numb to death and she wasn't wrong. He'd experienced that himself when he was younger. It had taken much to overcome that, but he did because it was wrong. Numbness for survival was wrong. That numbness became indifference. Indifference became callousness. Callousness became dismissiveness, and pretty soon you were a politician casually sending people off to kill other people without a care for their lives or the lives of the innocent that would inevitably be caught in the crossfire.

"Numbness is next to wickedness."

He stopped next to a pile a rubble. It looked inconspicuous enough, but for him, who could see things in the Force, there was a lot to be seen. He studied the debris and then set his pack down upon the ground. It would only be in the way if he kept it on for this. He even went so far as to remove his jacket and fold it, neatly, beside the pack before he moved towards the pile and began to grab and lift pieces away from it.

The exertion of the work left him glistening with sweat, but he did not complain. He did not ask for help. He simply moved once piece, and then another, and another, until a body revealed itself, bit by bit, beneath the pile. The body of a man, seemingly a security worker given the weapon beside him and his outfit. Still, it was a person who had died needlessly, and like all the rest, they needed to be laid to rest and catalogued. Then, later, they could be cremated or buried, depending on the family or the government if there wasn't a family.

He was careful as he removed the last of the debris, looking the man over before he bent down, put his arms beneath him, and lifted. It shouldn't have been so easy, but he used the Force to help a bit. The man was bigger than him, so if he hadn't, he wouldn't have been able to move him in a respectable manner. Once freed, he lay him gently upon the ground, and then began the same process as before: gently smoothing the mans clothes, making sure his eyes were shut, taking a bit of hair for a DNA sample, cataloguing his location, condition, and form in his notebook. The man was wearing a set of dog tags, so he removed those and put them into his bag to add to the collection on his ship, then he went for a blanket and lay it over the man, carefully covering his form.

"No one who lives is ever truly whole."

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro watched him work in silence as he dismantled the pile of rubble piece by piece, her eyes following the steady rhythm of his movements rather than the body gradually emerging beneath them. There was something almost ritualistic in the way he worked: no rushing despite the countless others who still needed him, no detachment despite the exhaustion etched into the district around them. Every motion carried the same deliberate care she had seen earlier, as though each person deserved the entirety of his focus regardless of how many waited.

His comment about the child lingered in her thoughts until she finally spoke, her voice quiet enough not to intrude. "The memory of a child can be surprising. Many young ones remember more than adults give them credit for, not always immediately, not always clearly, but years later they often recall the people who showed them kindness when they needed it most." As she said it, her gaze drifted across the ruined district and then somewhere farther still, beyond Carida entirely. "Then again, there are some of us who remember very little."

A faint smile touched her lips, though it held no amusement. "I have almost no memory of my childhood." The admission came easily, not because it lacked weight, but because she had long since accepted it. What she remembered were fragments: faces without names, moments without context, impressions that felt more like stories told to her than experiences she had lived. Most of what she knew about her earliest years came from others, not from memory itself. For a moment, she wondered whether he would consider that a loss, whether a man who preserved the memory of strangers would see forgotten years as another kind of death.

Her attention returned to him as he cataloged the security officer's remains with the same quiet reverence he had shown the others. When he spoke again about wholeness, she found herself studying him rather than the body. "No," she agreed softly, "I don't suppose they are." There was no self‑pity in the words, only thoughtfulness. "I've spent most of my life believing that surviving meant learning to carry the pieces that were left behind. Some people collect scars. Some collect regrets. Some collect names." Her eyes flicked toward the notebook before returning to him. "Perhaps being whole was never the point."

The thought lingered between them as dust drifted lazily through the late afternoon light, softening the devastation without diminishing it. After a moment, she tilted her head slightly, her voice quieter now. "Did something teach you that? Or did you always see the world this way?"

There was no pressure behind the question, only the kind of curiosity that came from the growing realization that whatever answer he chose to give or not give would reveal far more about him than anything she had asked before.

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

Digging. Always digging. Someone always wanted to get deep into his mind, to figure him out. Psychologists had tried to break through his mind when he was younger, after the event. He didn't even remember their faces. He remembered them trying, and him never answering them, and so they would get frustrated and the system would send him to another one, and then another, and another, until there just weren't anymore, or no one would take on the challenge. Nobody had ever gotten through his outer shell, and he wasn't about to let this woman do what people had failed to do for years. Especially since she had come from nowhere.

"I see the world as it is."

He finished with the security guard and moved to a large piece of debris nearby. There he sat down and reached into his pack for a meal bar, which he careful unwrapped. The wrapper was placed back into his bag and he took a small bite of the meal to chew slowly. Everyone, even him, needed a break at times. His body needed rest.

While he sat there, his eyes turned to her, studying her. She wanted to get through his armor and figure out who he was. If that was a game that she wanted to play, then while he rested he would use her own game against her. Perhaps that would get her to go away. Or, alternatively, it could result in her thinking he had further interest in her, which might result in her staying around for longer. He wasn't sure, but it was worth trying. Perhaps she would at least learn enough to leave him alone.

"The one who kills sees bodies. I see people. Why did you kill?"

He took another bite of his bar.

"Why did you decide you had that right?"

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro was quiet for a few moments after the question, not because she was searching for an answer but because she was deciding how to explain something that had never felt particularly complicated to her. The late afternoon light filtered through the dust hanging over the district, casting long shadows across broken pavement and shattered walls, and for a moment, her gaze drifted toward the recovery crews working with the steady persistence that always followed tragedy before returning to Malach.

"I don't know that I ever decided I had that right," she said at last, her voice free of defensiveness or evasion. "When I was younger, I thought the purpose of strength was protection. That if you stood in the right place at the right time, you could prevent terrible things from happening to people who didn't deserve them. Most of my life was spent acting on that belief." A faint smile touched her lips, carrying more weariness than amusement. "The galaxy turned out to be less cooperative than I expected."

Her eyes lowered briefly to her hands before lifting again. "There were moments when someone intended to harm people under my protection, and stopping them meant violence. Moments when hesitation would have cost innocent lives. Moments when there simply wasn't a clean choice available." The admission sat comfortably with her now, not because she was proud of it, but because enough years had passed that she no longer felt compelled to pretend otherwise. "I won't tell you I enjoyed it. I won't tell you I was always right. There are decisions I would make differently if given the chance. But I never woke up in the morning looking for someone to kill."

She watched a pair of workers lifting debris from a collapsed storefront, the motion slow and careful, before continuing. "Perhaps that's why your question feels strange to me. The way you ask it makes it sound as though there was a moment when I granted myself permission — when I consciously decided that another life belonged in my hands." She shook her head slightly. "I don't remember it that way."

Her tone remained thoughtful rather than argumentative. "I remember trying to protect people. Sometimes succeeding. Sometimes failing. Sometimes, discovering afterward that the difference between the two wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be."

She let the silence settle naturally between them, the dust drifting lazily through the warm light as though the district itself were exhaling. "My childhood is mostly a blank space," she said finally. "There are years I remember only in fragments: faces without names, places without context. Maybe that's part of why I hold onto the people I do remember."

Her expression softened, the shift subtle but unmistakable. "The dead don't leave us as easily as most people pretend." Her gaze drifted toward the notebook resting beside him, then returned to his face with quiet certainty. "I suspect that's one thing we probably agree on."

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

"Delusional."

There was no prevention when you killed someone to protect someone else. That wasn't prevention, it was transference. In the end, someone still died. Death still won, even if it's intended target was not the one killed. Prevention was a fools game. Only reaction made sense. Everything else was just done to make ones self feel good about the actions taken.

She said she didn't remember a conscious decision, but she made it. Someone had died instead of living and that only happened if the decision was made to kill.

"You don't remember it, but someone died, and most people don't aim to kill unless they have no conscience, so you made the decision all the same. You decided to end a life."

He wasn't going to talk about his childhood. She was eager to mention hers, eager to discuss that she didn't remember it. Some part of her was traumatized by it, no doubt. Something had made her the way that she was. He understood that feeling but he wasn't going to talk about it with anyone. Least of all a woman he just met who he hadn't wanted to talk to in the first place.

Instead, he ate more of his meal bar, letting silence linger. He finished off the bar and reached for a bottle of water, taking a quick drink and making sure not to drink too much. He needed to make sure he had plenty of water so he could work as long as he needed.

"Nobody cares about the dead except their family and myself. And even families sometimes forget, or never know. Life is more important than that. People shouldn't be forgotten."

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro listened without interruption, her expression remaining thoughtful even as he dismissed her perspective with a single word. Years ago, she might have argued more readily, challenged him point for point, dissected what she saw as the flaw in his reasoning, or defended herself against the implication that every life she had taken had been nothing more than a choice made for her own comfort. Age had made her less interested in winning conversations, and the dust drifting lazily through the afternoon light seemed to echo that shift as she watched a pair of workers maneuver a damaged support beam onto a repulsor sled before it could collapse further into the street.

"Perhaps," she said at last, the answer coming easily, "I won't pretend everyone I protected survived. They didn't." Her gaze drifted briefly toward one of the covered forms nearby before returning to him. "And I won't pretend the people I fought somehow ceased to be people simply because they stood on the other side of a battlefield. They had families. Histories. People who mourned them."

There was no defensiveness in her voice, only acceptance, the kind that came from years of living with the consequences of choices that had never been clean. "You see death and conclude that death won. I look at the same moment and wonder who is still alive because of it. Neither observation changes the fact that someone died."

She let the thought settle naturally between them, the silence neither sharp nor strained, simply present. "I don't think either of us is likely to convince the other," she added, and if the statement bothered her, it didn't show. The conversation had never felt adversarial to her, uncomfortable at times, certainly, challenging and even frustrating in places, but not hostile.

When he spoke of the dead again, however, something in her expression softened, as though this, at least, was familiar ground she understood without needing to translate.

"I think more people care than you give them credit for," she said, her gaze moving across the district. "The medic who stayed three hours past the end of her shift. The recovery worker who dug through debris because someone's family deserves an answer. The grandmother who keeps photographs no one else remembers to look at anymore."

A faint smile touched her lips.

"They don't do what you do. Most couldn't. But caring and remembering are not always the same thing." Her eyes settled briefly on the notebook resting beside him.

"What you're doing matters because people are forgotten, not because you're the only person who would care if they were." The observation was offered gently, without challenge, simply truth spoken aloud.

"If that little girl reaches her grandparents tonight, they'll remember her mother for the rest of their lives. The stories they tell will change. Details will fade. New memories will take their place. But remembering isn't always about preserving someone exactly as they were."

She looked toward the street where the child had disappeared. "Sometimes it's simply refusing to let the space they occupied become empty."

For a moment, she watched the recovery efforts continue around them, the slow, determined movements of people trying to rebuild something that had been broken, before returning her attention to him.

"I suspect that's closer to what you're protecting than the bodies."

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

"Nobody has the right to take the life of another."

He said it pointedly, staring at her as he did. It was his intent to make her understand that what she had done was just as wrong as the intent of the person she had done it too. No person was worth more than another. Security teams were just an excuse to treat others as less than. The people that had them felt they were somehow better and more deserving of life than other people, and they often exercised that belief by allowing their security detail to kill others.

It was wrong.

The fact that she had served in that role willingly made him dislike her. It meant she was alright with taking a life, even if she said she didn't ever intend to. It didn't seem that she felt any remorse for that fact, either. Not in what he had seen from her.

"Some people are forgotten. Some people have no family to remember them. For them, I'm the only one who remembers."

When she said something about the bodies he shook his head and stood, grabbed his bag, and turned to walk away. It wasn't about the bodies. It was never about the bodies. It was about the people that had been within those bodies, the people whose soul was kicked out by the act of death. They were sent into the Force. Their body was the tissue left behind. A husk.

"I don't care for the bodies, I care for the souls. Doesn't mean I can't be respectful to their body, though."

Yes, the other people she mentioned cared, but they eventually stopped caring about the people they dealt with as well. They eventually forgot them because they 'moved on' to the next situation that needed dealt with. He never moved on. The people went with him. His ship was full of details and bits and bobs from the people he'd helped and the people he strove to keep remembered.

"You'll never understand so you should stop trying."

He started his search for the next dead person, intending to continue until there weren't anymore.

Zesiro

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro watched him gather his belongings and turn away, her expression thoughtful rather than wounded, because by now she understood that every answer he offered was also a refusal, every glimpse beneath the surface followed by another layer settling neatly back into place. Whatever had shaped him into the man standing before her had done so with enough force that strangers were not permitted inside simply because they were curious, and she found she could not fault him for that, not when she recognized the instinct so clearly in herself.

"You may be right," she said quietly, the words carrying more than one admission. "About more than one thing." It came easily, not because she agreed with him entirely, but because she had begun to suspect that neither of them was truly discussing death anymore. They were speaking about the things that had shaped them, the things they carried, and burdens like that rarely yielded to logic or persuasion.

When he told her she would never understand, a faint smile touched her lips, small, tired, but genuine. "Perhaps. I've known you for less than an afternoon. Understanding someone usually takes longer than that." She didn't follow him when he turned away, nor did she call after him. Instead, she stood quietly for a moment, watching him disappear deeper into the fractured district, the dust and late sunlight swallowing him in the same muted gold that had softened every harsh edge of this place since she arrived.

Only then did she turn her attention elsewhere.

A recovery crew nearby was struggling to lift a section of collapsed duracrete from what had once been the entrance to a residential building. One worker insisted it was safe to continue; another argued they needed additional support. Zesiro altered her course without another glance toward Malach, stepping into the argument with the same calm certainty she had carried through a lifetime of crises. She didn't raise her voice or assert authority; she simply listened, assessed the damage, and began redirecting efforts toward a safer approach. A support frame was relocated. A weakened section marked for removal. A medic guided toward an elderly woman whose trembling hands suggested she was moments from collapse.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would be remembered tomorrow. Just one problem after another, the sort of work she had spent most of her life doing.

Hours earlier, she might have continued following the strange man who cataloged the dead and carried their memories from world to world, might have kept asking questions in hopes of understanding him. Yet as she handed a woman the bottle of water and listened to the distant sounds of recovery work continuing through the district, she found herself hoping that somewhere among the countless names he carried, there remained room for his own.

The dead would have Malach. The living, for the moment, had her. And somehow, that felt like enough.

Malach Orren

 

[Malach Orren]

He didn't want this.

Not any of it.

If things had been different when he was younger he probably would have been more like her. He probably wouldn't have cared about all the people that governments reduced to statistics and family members mourned before moving on with their lives. He wouldn't have spent the entirety of his life collecting DNA samples, cataloguing every deceased person that he came across. He probably would have actually had a life.

He wouldn't always be alone.

When he turned the corner on the street and walked out of visual of her, he stopped. This street seemed clear, but that wasn't really why he stopped. He stopped because he felt something and the something he felt wasn't necessarily pain so much as it was remorse. Remorse for the life that had been thrust upon him by a callous government that had allowed thousands of people to crowd a star station and collapse it's power under the stress, leading to thousands of dead refugees.

In part he felt remorse for how he's pushed her away, too. He shouldn't have. He never had before. He'd pushed thousands away that had questioned him. Why would this be different.

It's different because she wants atonement. She's grieving her loss of self.

He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as a sigh escaped his lips. It wasn't right of him to dismiss someone that needed his help just because she was being nosy about what he was doing. More importantly, if she wanted atonement he should make an effort to help her obtain it just as he helped the dead find their rest. The living needed rest as well. The living needed just as much care as the dead did, if not more.

So he turned around and walked to the corner, looking back to where she was. She had decided not to continue following him, and had settled into a role of helping the aid workers that were assisting in the cleanup and relocation work. For a moment he stood there and just watched. She seemed good at directing, leading, helping. It looked natural to her, but he could still tell that she was just going through the motions. She was as lost as the little girl had been.

After several minutes of just watching, he walked back down the street towards her and stopped when he was close enough that he could have reached out to touch her had he wanted to.

"Why do you grieve?" he asked, looking directly into her eyes for the first time. "Why do you hurt?"

Zesiro