Expanded summary can be found in my profile. It contains spoilers for KotOR.

Chapter 1 - Penumbra

She closed her eyes for a second and listened.

The low thrum of the Ebon Hawk's engines as the ship barreled through hyperspace was the only sound in the cabin. The adrenaline was wearing off, and half an hour of pure terror and shock – the mad rush through Davik's hideout, the confrontation with the crime boss and his hired gun Calo Nord, the flight through Taris's burning skyscrapers as death rained down on them, the furious battle with Sith fighters as Carth skillfully wove the Hawk through the blockade – it had all given way to a tense, ominous silence.

The last thing they'd seen before jumping into hyperspace was a double handful of Sith cruisers surrounding Taris, pouring so much fire into the planet that it was impossible to distinguish individual shots. Instead, it looked like giant sheets of red light were raining down on Taris; sheer panes of ruby glass that lovingly kissed the planet and set it ablaze. It had been a terrifyingly beautiful sight.

They sat there in the lounge, all of them gathered. Lara Sekhmet glanced around the room at her companions and took the measure of them.

Despite his great size, Zaalbar seemed to take up almost no space, shrinking into himself, his gaze centered on the small Twi'lek girl slumped beside him. Mission was looking across the room at nothing; flat affect.

The astromech droid, T3-M4, sat unobtrusively in the corner, but not indifferently. Lara could see its head swiveling almost nervously from person to person, the very image of worry and concern. Though they'd picked it up less than twenty-four hours ago, Lara already felt a sense of kinship with the droid. The origins of that feeling were just another piece of an increasingly disturbing puzzle playing itself out in Lara's tangled mind.

Canderous Ordo stood in the circular hatch leading to the swoop garage, leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed, tangibly removed from the group. He was relaxed, calm, and if he was at all troubled about gunning down his former employer less than an hour ago, he gave no sign.

Carth was the only one in motion, pacing near the hallway to the cockpit. His eyes had a haunted, closed-off look. Despite their whirlwind tour of Taris, Lara had spent enough time with Carth to realize that he had a hidden but immense wound in his soul, and anyone of even moderate emotional intelligence could see that the events of the day had rubbed salt in it.

It was the newcomer, though, who held most of Lara's attention. Bastila Shan gave the impression just then of being so very young. She stood roughly in the center of the room, her feet turned awkwardly as if she didn't know quite which way to face, as if she assumed that the group would look to her for leadership, but wasn't at all comfortable with being a leader.

"How… " Bastila began in an unsteady voice, before visibly gathering herself and turning to Carth. "How long will the journey to Dantooine take?"

"Thirty-six hours, give or take," said Carth, finally coming to a halt. He walked to the holoprojector in the center of the lounge and called up the ship's schematics. "That's assuming nothing comes up. The Hawk took some pretty heavy fire from those Sith fighters, and even though the systems seem to check out, I'm not familiar enough with the ship to be sure. It's a custom job. Who knows how the thing is wired?"

Bastila glanced at the holoimage, studying it. "Will the ship see us safely to the Jedi Enclave?"

Carth shrugged. "Near as I can tell. I think a qualified yes is about the best we're going to do. Unless you have any special insights, Canderous? You worked for her former owner."

Canderous mirrored Carth's abbreviated shrug. "I'm no mechanic. I don't fix ships, I blow them up."

Lara saw that Bastila was about to jump in again, and took the initiative, stepping forward and cutting her off. "It seems to me that it's an academic question at this point. Either the ship's going to make it, or it's not. All we can really do is keep an eye on the readouts in case anything crops up. T3, you can help with that, right?"

The astromech droid gave a cheerful, affirmative series of beeps, immediately moving towards the cockpit.

"Great," said Lara. "I suggest we all get some rest, then. It's been a long day."

"I'm too keyed up," said Canderous. "Saw a workbench in the back, gonna go clean my guns." He turned to go and then looked back. "Want to join me, Republic? That left-hand blaster of yours is a delicate piece of work."

Carth's eyebrows shot up, but after a second he nodded, and the two men walked to the back of the ship.

I believe Mission should sleep immediately said Zaalbar. His native Shyriiwook was an intriguing, complex language, but it was far enough removed from the sounds humans were capable of making that the language sounded alien to Lara's ears, though she understood it without even trying. Lara understood many languages without even trying. Too many. If she cast about in her distant memory, it seemed like she should land on something, some glimmer of sitting down with a Wookie or a droid and practicing, learning, struggling to come to grips with the esoteric language. But there was no memory like that. And that fact greatly disturbed her.

"Take the starboard cabin," said Lara.

Zaalbar nodded, nudging an unresponsive Mission. After a few unsuccessful prods, he merely grunted and swept her into his arms, carrying her to the cabin like a bag of flour.

That woke her up. "Hey, let go of me, you big lug!" Her high, girly voice echoed down the hallway. Zaalbar paid her no heed, and her indignant squeals gradually faded.

That left Lara and Bastila alone in the lounge. Bastila shook her head. "That girl is highly erratic. I don't believe this will be the best environment for her."

Lara controlled her surge of anger and didn't snap at the other woman. Instead, she merely got to her feet and started walking towards the port cabin. As she stepped into the hall, she turned and glanced at Bastila over her shoulder.

"That girl helped save your life. Would you rather we'd left her behind? Where would she be then?"

Bastila looked completely nonplussed, and Lara didn't give her time to recover. She walked into the cabin. It was dark and bare, with a smattering of plasteel containers on one side of the room, but it had a bed, and that was all she wanted right now. That, and one other thing.

Lara swung the hatch closed and stood in the center of the small cabin. She breathed evenly and calmly as she drew her vibroblade from her belt, hefting its weight, her hand resting comfortably on the grip. She closed her eyes, and took a deep, steadying breath.

Then she opened her eyes, raised the blade, and with an inarticulate scream of rage and anger, slammed the sharp edge down in a vicious arc on the containers.

They were mag-locked to the floor, and made of plasteel, so they didn't break. Instead, sparks flew off the points of contact as Lara abandoned any kind of form, holding her blade two-handed as she brought it down overhand in a series of brutal, powerful strikes, each one punctuated with a roar.

By the time Bastila flung the door open, her eyes wide and her hand on her lightsaber, Lara had gouged a series of deep scars into the container, and was holding the blade parallel to her leg, breathing hard, eyes aflame.

"What in space…?" Bastila took in the scene in a matter of seconds, her eyes going wide at the ruined container, the sword, and Lara's expression. "Stop this at once!"

Lara sheathed her sword in one smooth motion and turned to Bastila, who took an unconscious step back. "Can I help you?" she asked, her mild voice in sharp contrast to the fury she'd just displayed.

"I realize I may have been a bit abrupt," said Bastila haltingly. "Of course I'm grateful to Mission for her part in my... rescue." The last word seemed like it didn't quite want to come out. "I was merely expressing my concern that she would be better off elsewhere. A spaceship with an uncertain and potentially dangerous future is hardly the place for a young girl."

Lara blew out a deep breath, collapsing on one of the bunks, sitting with her back to the wall. "Again, would it have been better to leave her behind, considering that the Sith just slagged her entire planet?"

"I was hardly saying that." Bastila crossed her arms and tilted her head, regarding Lara as if she were an exceptionally confounding piece of art. "I wasn't proposing any course of action, I was simply expressing a wish that things could be better for her."

Lara blinked, then chuckled. "I'm sorry, I guess I jumped to conclusions there. Maybe it's that accent of yours. Makes everything feel like criticism."

Bastila had the grace to blush as she moved to join Lara on the cot, sitting beside her. "Talravin is one of the oldest Core worlds, and they place great value on refinement. I admit that some find it a bit…stuffy." She hesitated, and Lara caught a complex, almost fearful emotion on Bastila's face, but it vanished too quickly to analyze as the younger woman turned face her with determination. "What in the name of the Force happened in here, Lara?"

"What does it looked like happened?"

"It looks like you attacked these cargo containers in a fit of rage," said Bastila.

"That's accurate," said Lara, slumping against the wall.

"You seem to be fine, now." Bastila took a cautious position on the bed, sitting as far away from Lara as she possibly could without it being obvious that that was what she was doing.

"Hey, you weren't kidding about Jedi being observant."

Bastila frowned. "Is this really the time for levity?"

"I don't know, Bastila. We just saw a planet glassed in front of our eyes, a planet where Carth and I personally spent weeks helping wounded Republic soldiers, aliens being oppressed by the Sith, and a swoop gang who turned out to be fairly decent people. All of whom are dead now, incidentally. "

Bastila opened her mouth, but Lara just ran right over her, still in that calm, even tone.

"And then there were the Outcasts. Literally and figuratively living underground. I mean, I've seen some things, but these people…" Lara shifted on the bed; her sword had been digging in to her hip. "When I say they had nothing, I mean they had nothing. They had to live in a fenced-in little tent city, because outside the gates were a bunch of monsters that used to be their friends and family."

"The rakghouls," said Bastila.

"Tough sons of bitches," said Lara absently, rubbing a sore spot across her ribs. "Redundant vital organs, distributed nervous system. Need a lot of killing."

"Carth mentioned something about it. Some kind of foolhardy jaunt through a sewer?" Bastila's face made it easy to see what she thought about that idea.

"You could say that," said Lara. "You could also say that we brought hope to the most desperate, wretched, miserable group of people I'd ever seen. Outcasts, the lot of them. And they had this legend. A self-sustaining colony, buried underground, with artificial sunlight and plants and droids to farm the land. Called it the Promised Land. And damn it if we didn't find the actual map."

Bastila looked intrigued, almost despite herself, and more than a little guilty. "Carth never mentioned that."

Lara felt a surge of vicious pride. Something about Bastila just irritated her.

"I'm sure he didn't," said Lara. "He may have tried to, but you must have been too busy blathering on about how you didn't really need to be rescued and how we would've just blundered around Taris until you showed up, and how you were going to take command and shape us up."

"I did not need to be rescued," said Bastila, her chin coming up. She held Lara's gaze for a second, and then, wonder of wonders, one corner of her mouth twitched upwards into the possible beginnings of a very un-Jedi-like smirk. "I may have taken advantage of your very timely distraction."

They lapsed into silence. Lara looked out the transparisteel window of the Ebon Hawk, at the blue-white spirals and patterns of hyperspace. The engine ticked along, reverberating through the bulkhead against Lara's back. In the quiet, she could hear a slight stutter in the engine, an imbalance. It was likely not a problem. But… she couldn't tell, exactly, how she knew that.

"What happened back on Taris?" asked Lara after a while. She didn't look at Bastila, but she felt the other woman shift on the cot.

"I'm not sure what you're referring to," said Bastila. Her voice was guarded.

"Yes you are," said Lara. "That vision, or whatever it was. It wasn't the first time, either."

"The Force…" said Bastila, trailing off and letting the word hang there.

"That's not an answer, Bastila."

"It was, if you would only listen." Bastila stood up, crossing her arms and facing Lara directly. "It is possible that in the heat of battle, some latent Force sensitivity you possess resonated with me. I was… off-balance, to put it mildly. The neural suppressor took considerable willpower to fight off."

"What about before?" asked Lara. She leaned forward and tried to catch Bastila's gaze. "On the Endar Spire. It happened then, too."

"It could very easily have been the same phenomenon," said Bastila, waving a hand dismissively. "The ship was under attack, and I was completely immersed in the Force. If you recall, it was only my Battle Meditation that let the ship survive our encounter with the Sith. I may have acted like a… magnet, of sorts."

Lara stood up, and Bastila took a step back – an odd reaction, thought Lara. There was something cagey about the other woman, some odd dichotomy between her self-assuredness and the way she sometimes looked at Lara askance, like Lara was some kind of unpredictable, undomesticated animal.

"Why was I even on that ship, Bastila?" asked Lara, her voice low.

"You're a solider of the Republic."

"That's right, I am. But why that ship in particular? Carth said you requested me, specifically."

"You're highly trained and capable, as you proved on Taris."

"So is Carth. So are a hundred people. But out of all the grunts in all the fleet, you pluck me out. We crash-land on Taris, and suddenly things just click. I speak all the right languages, and I meet all the right people, and wherever I go, I make things happen. I must have influenced more lives in a week on Taris than most people do in their entire lives."

Bastila said nothing; just looked at her.

Lara resisted the temptation to stamp her foot. "It doesn't make sense."

"That is often the case, in matters of the Force." Bastila's expression gave nothing away.

"That's so not an answer."

"It is, though." Bastila moved to the side of the room where the plasteel containers were stacked, reaching out and running her finger over the scar Lara's sword had gouged in the tough surface.

"The Force is not some unfeeling, uninvolved source of power. It is life, it has presence. It guides as much as it obeys. It mystifies as much as it clarifies. It is not…" Bastila shook her head. "It's not simple. There's a reason the Jedi Council trains children from a very young age. I'm not a Master, Lara. I have much to learn still. If it seems like I have answers, I assure you that I do not."

Lara looked at her. Really looked at her. She was a bit frayed at the edges. Bastila's hair, usually an elegant mix of messy and controlled, was now simply a mess. A slightly curled lock of dark hair that usually framed her face nicely was now plastered there by sweat. Her eyes, usually a subtle, singular pale lavender, looked washed-out in the stark light of the cabin. Her sleeve had a blaster burn scored across it.

"I'm sorry," said Lara. "I know you don't. I also know that something doesn't make sense about what's going on here, and I'm not just going to ignore it. I… believe you, though. That you don't know what it is, I mean."

Bastila didn't reply, looking down at the container, her finger still tracing the marred surface.

"What compelled you to do this?" she asked, not looking up.

Lara blew out a breath. "I thought it was obvious. We made a difference on Taris. Helped people, changed their lives. Helped cure a disease, put a criminal organization out of business, stopped a bounty on an innocent woman. We even found the last piece of the puzzle to set those outcasts on that long, dangerous journey to a better life, gave them hope for the first time in decades."

"And?" Bastila finally looked up, her expression curious and open.

"And none of it mattered!" Lara felt the urge to destroy something again, the same feeling that had driven her to the cabin in the first place. It was a black, powerful, bubbling rage that shocked her in its intensity. "They're all dead now. We made a difference, and it all got wiped out. For nothing. We may as well have slaughtered our way through the streets of Taris and stormed that Sith military base with a wall of corpses for all the good we did anyone on that planet. We could have ignored all those people we tried to help, laughed in their faces and rescued you earlier. Hell, maybe that would have stopped the Sith from bombing the planet out of existence. We just… nothing we did mattered, in the end."

She was breathing hard, by the end of it.

Bastila looked… worried. She reached out a very tentative hand and put it on Lara's arm. "It mattered." She had to look up; Lara was the taller woman, by a few centimeters at least. "If you believe nothing else, believe that."

Then she turned, and walked out of the cabin.

Lara dreamed, only it wasn't a dream.

She was on the bridge of a ship. She wasn't anywhere in particular, she was just… there. That's what clued her in to the fact that it wasn't a dream. That, and the fact that she'd seen this scene before. A vision, not a dream.

The long walkway above the crew pit was littered with bodies. The last living one of them, dark-robed and grim-faced, fell the ground, joining the rest. Four Jedi stepped carefully over the bodies and approached the front of the ship, lightsabers held out in front of them, a glowing rainbow of green, blue, and yellow.

Lara recognized the one in the front quite well.

"You cannot win, Revan." Bastila's whole expression was a bundle of nerves and excitement and wildness just peeking out from behind the solemn mask of Jedi serenity.

The Jedi walked forward slowly. Lara's vision tracked forward, to the lone occupant of the command deck. The huge windows of the Sith destroyer's bridge framed a figure in black. Revan wore a dark, hooded robe with a cape, which came up and around the shoulders and attached to what looked like a dark leather chest piece. Revan wore armguards of the same material, faded and unassuming and utilitarian. The mask, too, had a certain kind of brutal simplicity. A rust colored plate with a slightly curved, single-piece eye slit.

Revan looked like a warrior displaced in time, something old and implacable and fearsome. The outfit gave the impression of usefulness and minimalism – there was nothing flashy, nothing extra. Revan was simply a force of nature.

The four Jedi advanced, slowly, cautiously. Even with the advantage of numbers, they hesitated. Revan slid back into a dueling stance, arms raised, a lightsaber snapping into being, a brilliant amethyst blade held at eye level, parallel with Revan's arm, tilted slightly down and towards the approaching Jedi. There was confidence in the motion, utter surety.

And then the world exploded. Lara had just enough time to see red light in the corner of her eye, as a second ship, another Sith destroyer, unleashed a storm of ruby light that filled the windows and threw everyone to the ground, the bridge filling with the sound of screams and the smell of smoke.

The smoke was thick. Choking.

Choking…

Lara woke up gasping and coughing. She was sprawled on the deck at the foot of the cot. The Ebon Hawk was shaking, and the cabin was filled with acrid smoke.

She rolled to her feet and stumbled out of the cabin. A sharp klaxon sounded from the cockpit, and over the loud noise Lara could hear the sound of yells and screams from elsewhere on the small freighter. The ship shuddered and shook.

A nasty jolt sent the deck flying towards her, and Lara stumbled against the wall as she made her way through the curved hallway. The smoke was thick enough to impair her vision, and she stumbled over something, turning the fall into an awkward half-roll. She glanced behind her and froze; it was a body she'd tripped over. Mission was lying slumped against the wall, eyes closed, blood leaking from a wound in one of her head-tails.

"Lara!"

She looked up, and Bastila was there, bracing herself against the wall as the ship rattled and banged.

"What happened?" Lara had to yell over the sound of the warning klaxon.

"I don't know!" Bastila knelt over Misson's body, her hands hovering over her, and Lara caught the faint blue-white tingle of healing energy. "We were on schedule to drop out of hyperspace at Dantooine, but when we did, something exploded in the back of the ship. Carth's in the cockpit doing everything he can. I came to find you. It happened so fast…" she looked up, her expression grim. "Mission's hurt. It's serious."

Lara made a snap decision. "Take her to the med-bay! I'll go to the engine room!"

Without waiting for Bastila's answer, Lara took off at a halting, jerking run, the fastest she could go with the ship still bucking and jolting. It took her only a few moments to make her way to the engine room – the Hawk wasn't exactly a large ship.

The smoke was thicker there, and Lara had to squeeze her eyes nearly shut against the stinging. She slapped the communicator on the wall near the door.

"Anybody bloody alive up there?"

"Lara!" Carth's voice was rapid, but calm, the voice of an experienced pilot who knew exactly how much trouble they were in.

"What happened?"

"Blew an alluvial damper, hyperdrive overheated. The strain of kicking us back to sublight caused some kind of cascade that must have melted a few key parts of the main engine. We lost the stabilizers, and the main drive is… uh… twitchy."

Lara coughed, holding up an arm and trying to breathe through the sleeve of her shirt. "Twitchy?"

"It might be a problem," said Carth.

"Can you land us on Dantooine?"

"It'll be somewhere between a landing and a crash. Anything you can do to nudge it towards the first thing…" he trailed off, the implication clear.

"Yeah, right, okay." Lara moved forward, waving at the smoke, trying to see. The engine was mostly hidden inside panels and under protective sheets of metal, but the hyperdrive was housed in the very center of the room. It was blinking rapidly and chaotically, which was never a good sign.

Lara hooked her fingers through the safety rings and tore a panel off the wall, throwing it to the ground uncaringly. The main engine control board was a maze of regulators and distributors and wires and blinking lights. She reached out, haltingly. Schematics and diagrams from the Republic's field-training manual on engineering flashed through her mind. She wasn't particularly gifted with machines, but she'd had to take the basic class, just like everyone else in her unit…

…and there it was again. Even in the middle of a crisis, there was that feeling. Because it wasn't quite true. On Taris, there'd been moments, flashes, when Lara had been quite sure that she was gifted with machines. She didn't have any memories of tinkering with droids as a child, or building things in her spare time, or fixing things in innovative and creative ways, but it was there nonetheless.

Her fingers moved over the wires, stripping off insulation and twining two of them together, her hands ahead of her brain. As soon as she asked herself what she was doing, she couldn't explain it to herself and her hands stopped moving. She took a step back and glared at the engine panel like it had personal offended her.

The ship took a violent dip, and Lara was thrown to her knees. Outside, she heard the sonic boom of atmospheric entry.

"Anything you can give me, Lara!" Carth's voice wasn't quite panicked, but it was close. "Just give me a little stability, a little more thrust, anything!"

"Come on!" Lara slapped the wall in frustration and dove into the panel again, her fingers hovering over the wires and buttons. It was driving her insane, like a mental itch, a space around which her thoughts refused to flow. "I need help," she muttered. "I need… something."

It happened quite suddenly.

Everything went quiet and still.

The ship was no longer shaking. There was no sound. Strictly speaking, there was no movement, either. Lara stepped back, blinking, and saw a tendril of smoke in the process of being sucked into a ventilation grate, frozen in time.

"A clever solution. Even for me."

Lara whipped her head around, tracking the voice.

A woman stood in the center of the room, wrapped in a cloak of black, frozen smoke. The recognition came in waves: the hair, dark and wavy and hanging loose to the shoulders. The voice, although it didn't sound quite right. The eyes, big and dark and expressive.

"You're… me," said Lara.

The woman who looked like Lara spread her arms and inclined her head, the smoke moving with her like an actual piece of clothing. "It was the best way you could think of. I could think of. Whatever."

"I'm… confused."

"Look back at the engine panel, if you want to really give yourself a headache."

Lara did, and saw the ghostly outline of her own hands moving over the interior of the panel. It was like looking through murky water at something only half-seen.

"Okay, I'm very confused."

The woman didn't approach, but smiled in a commiserating kind of way. "It's what you're doing right now. Fixing the engine, I mean. You had to get kind of get in your own head to do it, and I had to… well, let's call it 'interpret'? I suppose that's as good a word as any."

Lara fought off the urge to laugh, or cry. She wasn't quite sure which one she would have done, but she bottled it up. "What's happening to me?"

"What's happening to us," said the other woman quietly. "We're remembering something about ourselves. Something we lost. Something that was taken from us."

"Tell me."

"I don't know. Because you don't know. Because I'm you."

Lara crossed her arms. "I'm not that good-looking."

The woman laughed, free and easy. "I always did have a very high opinion of myself." She ran her hands down the sides of her body, the smoke contouring to it and emphasizing her figure.

Lara recognized the laugh; it was hers. She shuddered. "I feel like someone just stepped over my grave."

"It won't be easy." The woman took a step forward. "Bastila was right, you know. This has everything to do with the Force. What's wrong with us isn't simple or easy or something we can take a pill for. It's the Force. It's big, and messy, and complicated, and it's going to be very, very hard on you."

"What is?" said Lara, frustration bubbling to the surface. She felt her own mind kind of moving and shifting, felt the fragility and instability. She was talking to herself in a frozen moment in time as she fixed an engine she didn't know how to fix, and she was aware of the troubling implications of such a sentence.

"I don't know, exactly," said the woman. "I just know you won't like it. And I know that whatever we do, wherever we go from here, we must learn the ways of the Force."

"Bastila said I might be Force-sensitive," said Lara.

"You are," said the woman, utterly sure, utterly confident. "The Force is everything. The key. The answer."

Lara felt the world shift, the noise and shaking of the engine room start to return, as if from a great distance. She looked down and saw that she was back at the panel, her fingers flying over the controls.

She glanced back, and saw the other woman in a faded afterimage as she stepped back into the darkness at the edge of the room, the smoke swirling around her, up and over her, covering her face like a mask.

The Force… it's calling to you.

The voice was inside her head, now, and Lara heard it clearly, though it was soft.

...just let it in.

A/N: I wrote this for a change of pace. Also, because I was trying to write fast and without a lot of planning, and I've been kind of kicking around the idea of a KotOR fic. That combined with how the new Star Wars trailer got me insanely hyped... which reminds me, yes, those last lines are from the trailer. No, they don't mean anything. They're just there to signify how pumped I am for the new Star Wars movie.

I'd also say this was probably somewhat inspired by the only good KotOR fic I've ever read, On Being a Sith Lord. I really like the focus on identity and memory, on good and evil and pragmatism and the Force. Plus it's funny as hell. So, in a way you could say that this is taking that premise and making a full-length fic out of it, kinda? With my own Newcombian twist on things, of course. Oh, and no Revan/Carth romance, because screw that.