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