Viren Sekker - Old Works Thread

[CAIN]

Viren Sekker in:
Echoes of the Past

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This is how it feels to be Viren Sekker - Right Now.

You feel the hum of the distant engines through the cold durasteel deck-plates beneath your boots. The gentle hum of home reverberating up from your feet into your very bones.

You barely notice the hubbub of Imperials moving back and forth around the crowded parking hanger. The ship that stands in front of you is as much a part of your childhood as the scars running like lines of tension across the skin of your forearms as you clench your hands into fists. The leather of your gloves creaks, the sound seeming unnaturally loud against the dull roaring of blood in your ears.

“Deck officer.”

Your own voice sounds muted, distant. You feel a man in a grey uniform stop by your side, clipboard in hand.

“Will any of your men be boarding this ship for the rest of the day?”

“No, my Lord. All the modifications ordered by Lord Saltaeon are complete, other than that there’s nothing on the docket but refuel. Is there something you needed, my Lord?”

You wave him off with a small shake of your head, not bothering to reply as you move up the ramp into the ship. The entryway feels oddly claustrophobic around you, and for a second you are greeted with the unbidden mental image of jaws looming wide around you - before you push it from your mind.

The inside of the ship is cool and dark as the ramp closes behind you. The lighting takes a moment to warm up after not being on, the decades-old lighting pannels flickering and humming in their housings.

The ship’s entryway is little more than storage - lockers set into walls, likely containing rations and other mundanities. You decide you can come back to them later, and walk up the short stairs into the main corridor; through that, passing the sparse bunks and refresher retrofitted in place of crash seating, to the cockpit.

With your eyes closed you can still almost feel traces of them in this place. The cracked leather of the seats hasn’t been changed for a decade. Your hands brush over controls you haven’t seen since you were a child and another thought swims to the surface of your mind:

The last time I touched these consoles, they seemed impossibly large. Now they seem… strangely small.

The comm station is the only part of the entire ship that seems new. The gleaming console was put in to replace the outdated equipment that had sat there before, up to regulation with Horuset’s automated defenses and communication systems.

You sit in the pilot’s chair - what you had always thought of as your father’s chair, and now struggle to wrap your head around calling it your chair. You daren’t touch the control yolk in front of you. It doesn’t feel right.

Something moves in the corner of your eye. You turn towards her seat, half expecting that she will be there smiling at you, reaching to throw a switch and deactivate the engines you had accidentally spun up when you were a teenager.

The seat is empty. Silent.

Turning away before the empty seat can see the tears threatening to spill over your eyes, you notice there’s a section of the bulkhead that doesn’t lie flat at just above your eye level. There’s a slight lip to it, like the panel is coming loose. When you pry at it, something shifts; there is a box concealed there, no more than a hand’s breadth long and wide.

A cracked lightsaber crystal is the first thing that catches your eye in the hidden box. It’s clearly useless, devoid of the faint glow that would show the crystal was alive - deep red in colour, you wonder which of your parents it had belonged to before it had been damaged, why it had been kept. The box is filled with other trinkets like it, fragments and pieces that themselves don’t seem to have any value; ticket stubs for chartered transports, a scrap of red cloth, a bracelet made of woven leather.

A flimsiplast picture is tucked against one side of the box; you almost don’t notice it until you shift aside a wooden figurine, and it falls face down. Something makes you hesitate when you reach for it… some feeling deep inside that tells you there is something important on this tiny square. Your hands tremble as you reach for it - turn the picture over - yet for a moment you aren’t sure what you’re looking at.

The picture is dark, black-and-white filtered slightly grey from age. A small child peers out curiously at you, a slight frown creasing angular brows together in a look that could be concentration or irritation. It takes you a moment to realise this child - who couldn’t be more than two or three years old - is you.

Beside you is a more familiar face, but contorted in a way that makes it unfamiliar.

For what feels like the first time in your entire life you see your father smile at you from the square of flimsiplast. His hand rests on your shoulder - not holding you back or remanding you, but the gentle touch of a parent.

The picture blurs and you feel hot tears spilling down your cheek. Alone, you simply let them come, feeling no need to hide here; they are tears of sadness, yes, but there’s anger in them as well… anger that you have seen this now, anger that this one act of retrospective love doesn’t make up for years of… everything else.

You clench your hands into fists again until you can feel the scars, not just on your arms but across your back, your chest, every part of you until it feels like there are ropes tied around your body, until it feels like you can’t breathe–

You draw in a shuddering breath you hadn’t realised you were holding. Red fades from the corners of your vision and you deliberately put the picture back down, unwilling to look at the smile on your father’s face, unable to face the scarless child you had been.

The box is left on the seat, to be returned to later. The tiny fractured gem of the lightsaber crystal stays with you though, rolled between forefinger and thumb as you leave the cockpit.

The sleeping quarters are even more familiar than the cockpit had been. You can sense the tremors of the Force here, imbued in the very metal plates, faint enough to be felt but not interpreted.

You can already tell there is going to be more to go through here than in the cockpit. Here would be where all the possessions that had been precious were kept. The shallow bunk where you had slept sometimes after dull dinner parties seems cramped as you lower yourself onto it.

In a drawer beneath the bunk, you find your mother’s possessions. A set of pencils and a drawing pad, a few replacement parts for a lightsaber, sets of clothing in black and deep red that feels innately familiar as you run your hands over it. The material feels smooth and cool against the callouses worn into your hands by years of duelling, sparring and practice.

Steeling yourself you open the drawing pad. You can’t help but brace yourself as you expect a visceral reaction - as though seeing the art she had created herself would conjure up more images of her… but you’re a little disappointed when the few sketches of flowers and elegant sleeves provoke little more than a dull pang in your heart.

Her art is more detailed than the few attempts at painting you have made. The attention paid to the subtle curves of a petal that make them spring to life on the page - or the precise roll of a length of fabric as it drapes over a feminine arm, its body left to the imagination - or the outline of a dancer in motion… these things only show you how different you are from her.

You decide to turn over one last page before you close the pad; you can feel the weight of this last page, the ripples of it caused by a heavier hand, repetition of line after line with the pencil that has warped the dense paper just slightly.

On the other side is a portrait in close-up of your father. This is more as you are used to seeing him; austere, with his chin held high, jaw set and square and eyes aflame with… wait. No.

The fire in his eyes seems different somehow; you can’t quite put your finger on it as you literally put your finger to the page, tracing the outline of one eye and cursing as you smudge the powdery graphite. If there is fire in those eyes, it isn’t hate or contempt, but something else; the set of the square jaw isn’t perfect, either, the shape of his lip… upturned, not down.

This is your father as you are used to seeing him. But somehow this image of quiet intensity, of focused… emotion… feels wrong.

He looks out from the page as though the emotion setting fire behind his eyes is not hate, but passion. Love.

You slam the pad closed, feeling anger rise within you again. What was this? You had come seeking your family, come looking for some sign they were like you - but you had expected to find nothing. You had expected they would still be alien and distant, foreign and unknowable. That they weren’t somehow hurt so much more - because you feel like you hadn’t known them to begin with. As though you had forgotten.

You throw the pad back into the drawer it had come from and wrench open another, tossing the belongings inside more roughly than is necessary you know, but you need to be doing something with your hands, and throwing robes against a wall is somehow better than slamming your knuckles into the bulkhead.

Something solid touches your hand, and you stop yourself from throwing it too when you realise what you’re holding is a book.

No - not a book… a journal. Loose leaf paper bound together with leather, written by hand in a looping aurebesh script you have never seen before. Of all the writings you had ever seen produced by your parents, all had been digitised save a few, and you don’t recognise the handwriting at once.


[indent]In these pages, find recorded the journal of the Sith Lucien Sekker, written in the years following the Treaty of Coruscant.[/indent]

The words echo in your head as you stare at them on the page. Your father had kept journals? You had never known of them, even as a child, had never been told of them by your cousin or your mother, nor any other of the multitude of useless relatives who had told you their deaths had been ‘noble’ and ‘honorable’.

You feel like your parents have become strangers in a matter of minutes.

It is with a sense of mounting dread that you pry open the leather binding and let the journal fall open at a random page. The book feels disproportionately heavy in your hands, leaden with expectation - or perhaps with chains that will soon burden you instead of the one who wrote it.


[indent]22nd day of the 10th month.
Corellia is an unwelcoming place. Amanda and I have been stationed in the wreckage of what was once some kind of museum, the defenses are adequate enough and supplies… [/indent]

You feel your attention drifting as the neat, squared-off handwriting goes into pointless detail about the quality of food and the morale of soldiers you instinctively presume to be long dead. Your eyes drift down the page. A word catches your eye, and it takes you a second to find again near the bottom of the entry - your own name.


[indent]…Viren remains in my thoughts. The boy does not yet know the turmoil of war, though he has come to know pain. I regretted my anger the last time we spoke, though I can never show that to him. I caught him playing - yes, as children will do - with one of the weapons from my study. I was angry. Not because he had stolen, nor that he had dented a steel blade made for display rather than use, but angry because of all things the boy wanted to emulate me. When I asked him why he had taken it he said, “Father if I wish to be a great swordsman, and I do, then I must practice every day from now until I am grown, like you did. So I can be like you.”
So he could be like me. When I heard those words I couldn’t stop myself from striking him in my anger.
The boy has so much to learn about the world. I could never ask him to be like me; to forsake family, to live as I have, on the edge and on the battlefield rather than for himself. I have devoted my life to my empire - what did it earn me? No titles, not even a name of my own. My own father, dead by my hand; my brother, dead by my own hand.
I would not have the same fate for my son.
He must learn to be better than I was. Amanda knows my feelings on this, wishes that I could be less hard on the boy - but my way with him is out of love, and she knows this too. Amanda is the only one who sees to the truth of me. I pray one day that my son may understand too.[/indent]

You read the words over a second time, a third. There is no word for the emotions that rise within you, potent and toxic, choking you from the inside; it is like you are feeling him die afresh for a second time, clinging to the harness of an evacuation shuttle as it streaks away from Korriban.

The time he wrote of is fresh in your memory, the burning of your cheeks in shame as your father bears down on you, the agony as he drew his lightsaber and all but cut you in half from hip to shoulder with a single stroke of the violet blade.

How can that have been love?

How can the years of scorn, of contempt and rage that he had shown for you, have been anything but hatred? Yet the words are right there on the page in front of you, in plain black ink on yellowed paper.

Anger such as you have never felt boils inside you, threatening to spill out in a torrent of the Dark Side - or maybe just threatening to make you sick, your stomach twisting over and over inside you like a wounded serpent.

A wordless, guttural sound reaches your ears… and it takes a moment for you to register that this sound has come from your own lips. You struggle to draw a breath in, gripping the journal in your hands until the leather creaks, the pages crumple, and you know that you wouldn’t need to draw on the Dark Side to tear it in half with your hands… but something stays you from it, something tells you that you should keep reading and not destroy the book.

But that is the voice of sentiment and weakness. You recognise its whisper in the back of your mind and hurl the book against the wall so hard that the entire ship seems to reverberate with the sound of its impact.

“If you were aiming for me…” a gentle voice says from the doorway, “You missed.”

You hadn’t even noticed her arrive. So caught up in your own emotions and feelings you had been blinded to the world around you - sloppy, you tell yourself, stupid.

With a rustle of shifting robes, your wife sits just beside you on the bunk, resting her head against your shoulder. You breathe in the scent of her dark hair and feel the knot of anger in the centre of your chest loosen just fractionally. Her presence washes over you like a breath of cold mountain air after a month in the desert.

She doesn’t need to ask you what is in the book, what it was you read. She simply sits with you until the rage passes, basking in the afterglow of your presence, letting your anger come to you and observing it without judgement. If anything she seems pleased by your rage, the feeling of power it brings.

Right now you don’t feel powerful. You feel like a ten year old boy clutching at a wound whose scar will never heal.

“My father…” you start to say, but your voice comes out as a hoarse croak and you have to bite back tears before you can say anything else. “He left behind journals.”

“How dull…” she says, turning her lips towards you and nestling closer against your neck. “What do they say?”

“That he wasn’t the person I thought he was,” is the only truthful answer you can give her. She hums, knowing there is more to say - feeling it in the link between you that has become as much a part of your mind as any other. She does not need to ask; she knows you will tell her eventually.

Amanda is the only one who sees the truth of me.

You are suddenly struck by how true these words feel for you and Tse’kira. Without question or reservation she has looked into the blackest pit within you and decided to love you anyway. Just as you have seen the fathomless lust for death in her heart too.

“Burn it all?” she offers, lifting her head from your shoulder and touching a soft hand over the scars atop the back of your own. “It would make a wonderful bonfire…”

You shake your head and take her hand in your own. “I will go through every piece on this ship. Every scrap of paper, every picture, every journal page by page… no matter how much pain it may cause me, is nothing to the pain I have already endured. Then when I have wrung every scrap of pain that I can from this place… then I will make it my own and start anew with my true family.”

The dawn breaks for your world as she turns a smile on you. Golden eyes like pools of liquid fire sparkle at you in the low lighting.

“Your true family and I will be waiting for you when you are done. Do not be gone too long, husband.”

“I won’t.”

She rises, the tips of her fingers brushing your cheek as she turns to depart.

Her footsteps retreat away down the boarding ramp. You are left alone in the ship that still belongs, in your heart, to your father. The ghosts of their lives dancing before your eyes.

You sigh. Resigning yourself to the work as it must be done, you bring the journal back to your hand; this time starting at the beginning… and settle in to discover for the first time who your father really was.


This is how it feels to be Viren Sekker… For now.