InsaneJournal

Who: Cade Skywalker and Lucifer.
What: Nightmares of Ossus and traditional Skywalker temptation.
Where: Cade’s noggin’.
When: Night after Mother’s Day.
Warnings: Massacre, visions of unpleasantness. Nothing hugely gorey, but mature subject matter ahoy!

Nightmares were hardly a new thing to Cade. Most nights, those were the only sorts of dreams he ever had. For seven years his nightly visions had focused on Ossus, on replaying every single minute of it again and again and again. Most mornings, he woke up with the screams of the dying ringing in his ears and the phantom scent of corpses scorched from sabers and blaster fire filling his nose. He knew it was all in his head, knew that these ghost sounds and scents were just that, but it didn’t make it any easier. Worse by far were the nightmares that seemed like dreams, idyllic romps through the could-have-beens had things played out differently and the Alliance won the war, or the Jedi not been slaughtered on Ossus. He could live out lifetimes in his head, sometimes, only to be thrust into the reality of loss all over again as he opened his eyes and came back to reality.

Cade was having one of the former tonight. It had been seven years since Ossus, but not a single sense memory had dulled. He rebuilt the temple in his head every night, rebuilt it and destroyed it again and again, every night. It wasn’t something he talked about, not to anyone. Even Jariah Syn and Deliah Blue didn’t know that, though Blue likely suspected, given the number of times they’d shared a bed. No one in Lawrence knew, and no one would if Cade had his way. Allana and Dawn may have been living with him at the moment, and Jacen might have been trying to act vaguely mentor-ish when he wasn’t too busy being a smug child at everyone, and Jaina might have been getting pretty good at making Cade feel uncomfortable, but none of them could know this. These were private, and even if Dawn suspected his nights were rough for the same reason Blue did, she wouldn’t know the truth of it.

It was the day that did it. Mother’s Day. Cade imagined it would be a wonderful day for people with wonderful mothers, or people who were wonderful mothers themselves. All it did for him was remind him of how much he’d missed having a mother growing up, and how angry he was at the cold-blooded, manipulative, Sith bootlicking bitch of a woman that his mother turned out to be. Celebrate his mother? If given the opportunity, he’d gladly murder the bitch, and then bring her back just to murder her again. So to say that Mother’s Day hadn’t done damage to Cade’s already collapsing wall of sanity and balance would be an outright lie, and to say that it only had a little effect would have been the understatement of the entire freaking millennium. As he finally managed to drift off to sleep, he’d considered himself lucky that he hadn’t murdered anyone today.

And the minute the sandman came, so did the Sith.

Suddenly he was eleven years old again, eleven and training in his quarters when the first deafening sounds of orbital bombardment broke the quiet of the already tense morning. For about two seconds, those sounds, louder than any thunderclap and twice as ominous, were the most frightening things the young Cade had ever experienced. For only two seconds the sound of the Imperial death machines became the monsters of his nightmares, but as he exited his quarters with only his training saber and saw what was happening, they were quickly supplanted.

Sith.

Dozens of them.

It was impossible. Impossible! Cade knew this was impossible. There were only two Sith. That was the rule! That was the way it was! There couldn’t have been dozens of them, and yet…here they were. Sabers ignited, they swarmed like the holovids he’d seen of aggressive plagues, swarmed like the soldiers he’d watched in holonet broadcasts of the war. But this wasn’t like those. In the war, even at its worst, the killing hadn’t been like this. It hadn’t been indiscriminate. In the exciting battles he’d seen on his vidscreen when his father wasn’t around, there was such a thing as surrender. There were rules of engagement. These Sith here had no rules. There was no surrender. Knights, padawans, and younglings fell left and right, the Sith neither knowing or caring which they cut down. What few they left, the Imperial forces picked off with morbidly comical ease. Standing there amidst all the chaos, Cade felt somehow inexplicably dirty and knew, on a level no child should ever know, that he was watching nothing short of a slaughter. There would be no surrender today. No strict rules of war to hold the enemies at bay.

There was only death.

It was all he could feel. Even if he tried, he couldn’t blot out the feel of it. People he knew, people he loved, all falling silent in the Force with a terrifying finality, and above it all was the Dark. The eleven year old Cade had never felt it before, and it disgusted him now. It felt like rotten grease and at the same time like sticky gum, and his young mind was fixated on the notion that even if he scrubbed for the rest of forever, he would never be able to quite get it off.

It was all he could do to steel himself against it and focus on two signatures in the Force, signatures he knew that would be side by side. His Master, Wolf Sazen, and his father, Master Sazen’s teacher, Grandmaster Kol Skywalker. They were in the grand promenade, entrypoint of the temple, surrounded by Imperials. Igniting his saber, Cade tore off through the hallways without a word. Though young, he was the top of his class, and he caught a few Sith by surprise on his way. He hadn’t been ready to kill another living being, had been nowhere near ready in fact, but neither the Sith nor fate would give him a choice in the matter. More frequent were his skirmishes with Imperials, and they too fell before the focused panic of a young Skywalker.

The nightmare jumped ahead as it usually did. Cade, along with his best friend and his father’s apprentice Shado Vao, were in the promenade with Master Sazen and Kol. They were outnumbered, fighting a losing battle, and trying to blot out the screams of the younglings as they inched toward a waiting shuttle. That’s when they all felt it: A surge in the Dark. Cade didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed like Master Sazen and his father did, because a second later Master Sazen was ordering them to get the younglings to the shuttle.

Again the dream jumped ahead. Cade, already unhappy with having to leave his Master and his father behind to get to the shuttle, watched out the window as the black-and-white skinned Darth Nihl slew his Master with the wicked Sith polearm he favored. His father stood alone amongst a horde of Sith, and Cade could no longer stand it. Unable to bear it any longer, he commanded Shado to lift off before charging back out into the temple to stand with his father. Another Sith fell as Cade cut his way to him, and a leaping kick took another’s nose from him. It lasted only a moment before his father forced him away, commanding him to take Master Sazen back to the shuttle and get off planet. Unhappy but unwilling to disobey his father, his idol, Cade had done as he was told.

Only to watch helplessly as Master Sazen died on a table, surrounded by terrified younglings all looking at him to do something.

Time seemed to slow, as it always did for this moment. Unwilling to lose one more person, Cade stared the universe right in the face and said NO. He could still feel the lightning engulfing him as he placed his hands on Master Sazen and brutally tore him from the jaws of death. There was no peace, no calm now. There was only rage and fear and pain, all of it instinctually honed to a fine edge that Cade brought to bear like a weapon against a force of nature.

At the same moment, Cade felt his father’s life wink out from the Force.

It was over in moments. Sazen drew in a shuddering breath. Cade stumbled back, overwhelmed not just by the exertion, but by the feeling of pure, unbridled Dark that thrummed and throbbed and sang in every fiber of his being. Everything hurt. Existence was pure hell. His head swam and his muscles screamed and his own nerve endings tore at him. Cade could only dimly register a terrified youngling’s question, but it haunted him all the same.

“Cade? You didn’t die…did you? Cade?”

The nightmare cut forward again, past Cade’s heated declaration that he was going back to kill the Sith that had killed his father. He was in the cockpit of the dingy little shuttle, still so full of the Dark he could taste it. Master Sazen’s condemnation of his resurrection still rang in his ears, but there was no time for that now. A Sith blockade stood in their path, promising to end their flight before it even really began. Giving in to his own need for vengeance and death, Cade jumped into a fighter, ready to destroy the blockade.

Another brutal jumpcut, this time to Cade floating in orbit over Ossus, watching the Sith and the Imperials finish slaughtering his people, helpless to do anything while strapped into his fighter’s chair, breathing recycled oxygen.

And then, finally, the worst cut of all. Past Rav’s band of ruthless pirates picking him up, and young Jariah’s quick-thinking saving his life. Past Cade’s betrayal of the Jedi’s sacred treasures as he lead the pirates to them. It skipped past all that and cut right to the end. Rav’s crew was packing up and heading back to the ship. Cade could feel the pirate’s breath on his neck as the man loomed over him from behind. At his feet was his father’s corpse, no less cold and dead for all of his pointless nobility and self-sacrifice. And from behind him, Rav’s voice, mocking and cruel all in the same sentence, asking where their ally the Force was now. This wasn’t the worst moment because Cade didn’t have an answer. It was the worst moment in the whole of the nightmare because he did.

It was with the Sith.

…Except this time, the dream didn’t end. This time, Rav’s cold, cruel laugh faded out into nothing, and so did the sounds of the other scavengers, pirates and vultures as they picked from the corpses. Everything was quiet. Too quiet. And as Cade stared down at his father’s body with bloodshot, orange-colored eyes, he realized that he wasn’t eleven anymore. He was eighteen again. Eighteen and thrumming with Dark almost as badly as he was that day. Dimly, he knew something was wrong. Dimly he knew he should have been waking up. Dimly he knew he should have been investigating why he wasn’t.

But he just didn’t care anymore.