Work Text:
It felt so strange, after more than 10 years.
The last time he was here, he was barely an adult, working on his final thesis and watching with a growing unease the way the Empire crept closer and closer. First, it was just recruitment drives on the campus, promising them opportunities and work and career. Not as troopers, of course, they were looking for them elsewhere. They needed intelligent people to be officers, and they needed doctors and lawyers and engineers. Then came a small unit permanently stationed nearby - for their safety, of course. Next were changes in their curriculum, courses changed or replaced, data-tapes removed from the library.
In the end, it was people who started to disappear. He was one of the lucky ones who managed to leave of his own will,
“Please, mister Nemik, try and reconsider your decision. It's just a few more months…”
He shook his head. “I'm sorry,” he whispered, and his voice broke on those two words: “I can't. Family emergency.” He was a terrible liar, and he was sure his professor knew exactly why he's leaving. But if it was true, she'd never told.
“In that case, let the Student Affairs department know, so they can mark your studies as temporarily suspended.”
He waited for a couple more minutes, but when she didn't say anything else, he packed his bag, thanked her, and went.
“Karis.” It was jarring to hear his first name from her. “Stay safe.”
not being taken for a routine questioning, only to never be seen again.
When he finally managed to find his way through the half-remembered corridors, elevators and ramps, he found the door blank, with a darker rectangle where the name tag used to hang. He could hope that his supervisor just retired. He couldn't remember if he'd ever seen her name on the list of the executed.
He'd scrapped his original thesis. It no longer felt appropriate for this new world, for the person he'd become. But he hoped she could help him again.
A year after he left,
just after the Aldhani, when the Empire clenched its fist around the Galaxy so tight it almost stopped breathing
the university has been transformed to an Academy. Before the first post-war classes arrived, they'd hastily removed the remnants of the Empire, but when he looked close enough, he could still see the outlines of Stormtroopers and TIE fighters and Stardestroyers, murals hidden under a thin layer of plaster.
It wasn't the only relic of the Empire there. He’d seen guys during the orientation who still walked with a military precision and changed the subject when asked about the last couple of years. He didn’t hate them. They weren’t the ones who decided to burn down entire nations or to strip mine whole planets just to build a new weapon. They weren’t - most of them - in it for the power, they just needed money or a way out or they had been drafted. And like them, he was still living halfway in the war, reaching for the blaster that no longer hung at his side with every louder noise, making plans of escape whenever he was,
He'd been arrested once.The interrogation took several days, in a hard chair, unable to move, without his meds, without even the brace that helped him to sit up straighter. At the end, when they finally let him out, he was in so much pain he couldn't even think clearly. But they'd never get anything out of him. For the Empire, he was just another casualty of the process. Another one who was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
he still had nightmares. It was much worse to open his study plan and to see the names he knew from the imperial propaganda. People who'd never actively killed anyone, who'd never helped to build the Death Star, who weren't war criminals, but who coasted through the hardest years of their lives smiling at the right people at the parties and climbing the academic ladder when their less agreeable colleagues had left or been made to leave. It made him sick to his stomach to sit in the lecture room and learn about the finer details of astronavigation from someone who not so long ago had been calling for his death and for the death of his friends.
It made him want to scream. And he screamed, when all that bantha shit was too much on him. When people talked over him, or turned to his friends like they were his caretakers. When he heard whispers of “it used to be better, before” and “there used to be order” and “the Empire knew how to deal with problems like this ”, where the problems often meant people. When the constitution and the first laws of the New Republic came into effect, and while so much has been fixed, so much more was still broken and overlooked and swept under the rug. When someone well meaning asked him for the hundredth time why he was using a mechanical chair, when his veteran money could buy him something better
We've grown reliant on Imperial tech, and we've made ourselves vulnerable
something that has to be checked by a repair droid every other week, and that stops working when you try and look at its insides without a specialized key.
When he was desperately tired from the endless little battles and from the memories of all the ones he lived through, from the thousands of names on the memorials.
But for the first time in the decade, there were moments he could allow himself to just relax. The Galaxy was finally breathing freely - stuttering and gasping sometimes, when some forgotten darkness poked its head out, trying to tear a bit of what they'd fought for itself, but still. He could just roll through the city, without rush and looking over his shoulder. Without flinching every time he saw the glossy white that used to mean the troopers' armor.
He missed his old notebook, even if he knew it became what he always wanted it to be.
But it was time to start a new one.