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Every time he put his foot down it sang with pain. He limped heavily, putting nearly all his weight on his one good leg, focusing every thought in his body to moving forward on a path that he had long since memorized.
He walked, slowly, haltingly, painfully. He welcomed the pain. It kept him grounded here and now.
A four-way junction, at which he had to go left. Admiral Konstantine was there, scrolling on his data pad as he walked. He stopped, offering a cordial nod and polite greeting of, “Admiral Konstantine.”
Konstantine glanced up, looking irritated to be pulled away from his work. Hard eyes went up and down his form in a way that reminded him of a predator sizing up its next meal.
He knew he looked a mess— cheeks and nose flushed red from the bitter jaws of cold; dark bags hanging under his eyes; stubble beginning to muss his carefully-trimmed sideburns; hair falling loose from its usual slick hairspray shell; most notably, the leg, a very broken femur that the medics had set without bothering to administer painkiller.
He was a mess, and he knew it, but that didn’t mean that Konstantine had to look so disgusted, upper lip curling in a sneer. “Agent Kallus,” he responded icily, and continued without anything further to say.
Kallus stared after him, slack-jawed. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like he expected a wide grin and a friendly handshake (although that would have been kind of nice), not from Konstantine, but… he had almost died. Just a recognition of that, just some acknowledgement…
He tried in vain to dislodge the memory of seeing Garazeb (were they on a first-name basis? Were they still on titles? Did Garazeb even know his first name?) reuniting with his weird little crew. The nuisance Jedi boy, who he still thought of as Jabba, had practically jumped into his arms to hug him. Syndulla had told him they were all worried. They had missed him, they’d come back even at great risk to themselves.
It looked warm. It looked comforting. It looked like a family, like a home. And he didn’t know if the reason he was thinking that was because he was still cold down to his bones.
He makes himself keep walking. He crosses paths with no one else on his way back to his quarters, punching in the code with fingers still numb.
He sits heavily on the edge of the bed, unable to suppress a quiet groan of both pain and relief— pain, from his aching joints after a night spent on a frozen wasteland he thought he was going to die on; relief, from finally getting off his leg. He’s alone now, it’s okay to feel pain when no subordinates or superiors could see him.
He’s always alone, here, even surrounded by other troops and officers. Maybe the only time he hadn’t been alone in his whole life was on that Force-forsaken rock with a rebel who should by all rights have killed him on the spot, but instead chose not only to spare him but to save him.
He still has the golden-yellow meteorite in his hands, still exuding warmth. For a moment, he holds it against his chest. He can’t feel it through his hard plastoid cuirass. He could feel Zeb, though. Zeb got through.
He shakes his head firmly and puts the meteorite on the inlaid shelf by his bedside.
He sits there for longer than he meant to, mulling over his thoughts and staring blankly into nothing. To have said what he was thinking about would be as good as confessing to treason. And yet, somehow, he cannot stop himself from spiraling deeper down that hole.
Who was he, anymore, really? Was the Empire worth it? He had done horrible things in its name. He had destroyed whole worlds, cultures, families; torn them all down, and for what? And after all those atrocities he had done, a Rebel had made the choice to save his life, a choice he feels ashamed to realize that he would not have made if the roles were reversed.
A Rebel, a Lasat, an Honor Guardsman, a Spectre. In the eyes of the Empire he was four times over a criminal.
He was also the most honorable man Kallus had ever met.
Absently, Kallus goes through the motions of removing his armor. He stands, biting his lip against the pain, and sets it in his closet. As he does so he passes by where he had set his bo-rifle.
He stares at it. It was a fine weapon, and had saved his life many times, including yesterday. Today? Today it mocked him, reminding him of the terrible things that he had done.
Who was he? As a boy, scrounging the streets of the lowest level of Coruscant, he was a street rat the other boys called Alex and adults whose garbage he stole scraps of food from called scum. As a young man, making it into the Imperial Academy on a hard-won scholarship, he was Cadet Kallus, fighting for every step of ground he gained on a long, hard way up from nothing. On Onderon, he was Junior Agent Kallus, fresh out of the Academy, the youngest of a battle-hardened group of older agents, affectionately referred to as the ‘baby’ of the team because of how fond they were of him. He hadn’t known then, that they would all go down, and he would remain, a testament, a warning. ‘One to carry the message,’ said the mercenary, and he left him there in that dark forest, alone. On Lasan, at his worst, he was Battlefield Agent Kallus, a butcher, a murderer.
He was ISB-021, the very model of a perfect Imperial soldier, cold and calculating and remorseless in his hunt for any who challenged the Empire’s galactic order.
He was Alexsandr Kallus, just a man, and he wanted to thaw.
He heads for the fresher and strips out of his uniform. For the first time that he can remember in maybe his entire life, instead of folding it neatly to rewear the next day or dropping it down the laundry chute, he leaves it sit in a pile on the floor.
He takes a shower with sonic so hot it scalds. He scrubs every last bit of hair gel out until his hair is clean down to the roots, then does it again just to make sure. He stays in the sonic so long that his fingers pruned to the point of pain.
He was warm, now, at least, but somehow felt just as dirty as when he got in.
The mirror is fogged when he gets out, and he gets to work detangling his hair. It takes every piece of training he went through in the Academy to keep his mind blank, to not think about things he had stuffed in the closet and locked away for a very long time. He’s feeling things now that he hadn’t felt… probably ever.
Remorse, shame, and guilt for all the pain he caused and hadn’t even realized that it was wrong. Anger that it took so long to connect that the blood on his hands belonged to real people who had feelings same as he did. And longing, for something that he couldn’t even put a name to, something that he’d seen in the Spectres.
Good soldiers didn’t feel shame, or anger, or guilt. Good soldiers followed orders; good soldiers were supposed to live and die for the Empire.
An Empire that didn’t care about them. An Empire that would trample the liberty of billions to gather more power unto its faceless Emperor. An Empire risen from massacres of whole cultures, an Empire that ruled with an iron fist of terror.
“Damn you, Garazeb,” Kallus whispered, an odd feeling that he equated to hatred settling in his chest. He was content in his ignorance, in his ignorance he was safe. Now he stood here thinking rebel thoughts, like the murder of the Jedi was wrong. What we did on Lasan was wrong. I should do something about it.
He shakes his head very sharply to try to dislodge those thoughts. It does not work.
He dresses for bed, but when he goes back into the main area of his quarters he sits at his chair against the wall, picks up his bo-rifle, and sets to cleaning it. It’s repetitive, automatic, and mindless. He can zone out. He doesn’t have to feel.
But when he drifts, he goes back to the winter moon. He goes back to Onderon, something he hadn’t done in years, staring in shock out into the forest, dreading and maybe even hoping that the mercenary would turn back and finish him off. He goes back to Lasan, relaying Yularen’s order to use the experimental T-7 rifles, against his weapons tech’s advice that they hadn’t been tested, because that was what they were told to do: test the weapons, and good soldiers followed orders.
“Dammit,” he swore out loud, slamming the rifle down across his thighs, regretting it immediately, and yelping in pain when he hit his broken leg.
It wasn’t Garazeb Orrelios he hated right now. It was himself. That pit of resentment in his gut was burning self-loathing.
Burning— no, not burning. In the Empire nothing was warm but the fires they lit— he lit— scorching down anything in their way. In the Empire everything was cold, all hard edges and stark metal literally and metaphorically. He was cold in every sense of the word. Frozen, frostbit, and icy.
He wanted to be warm, for once in his life. He was sick of being left out in the cold, giving up every piece of himself for an Empire that didn’t care that he had nearly died for them. For too long had he been their servant, sowing destruction and death, and he was done. He wanted to thaw.
Treason. Treason. Every word that he had just thought was flagrant treason, insubordination—
And he didn’t care. He really, truly, did not care, and it was freeing, and he felt as warm as that meteorite that still softly glowed beside his bed.
He drags himself to his feet and makes his leg cooperate as he walks to his bed. He sits there for a long time again, thoughts colliding and bouncing off the edges of his brain like atoms in the center of a star.
Kallus reaches for his data pad, fully and earnestly intending to fill out the form for his resignation— but as soon as he unlocks it, the file he had been reading jumps out at him.
Fulcrum- rebel spy net operating undercover behind Imperial lines. Title shared by multiple operatives in many sectors. All Fulcrum spies are charged with high treason against the Empire; if discovered, they are to be detained and interrogated by an agent of the ISB.
All thoughts in Kallus’ head ground to a screeching halt, and he stares at the geometric diamond symbol for several minutes.
The Empire was enormous and powerful. It was a steamroller that seemed impossible to stop. And if he turned a blind eye to it, even if he up and left he was still just as bad as before. Not opposing tyranny was the same as fighting to uphold it.
It would be dangerous, but not any more than anything else he did every single day of his life. Besides, who would suspect that someone whose job was to root out the rebel spies was actually one of them? And didn’t he owe it to those whose lives he had destroyed to try to do good? To try to help, to try to atone for the sins of his past? To try to undo some of the evil that he helped spread?
Whatever he did, he would never lay the ghosts of Lasan to rest. But he owed it to them to help Lothal— to help Zeb. In that moment, Kallus made a decision that made him feel warmer than anything he had ever done before.
He would become Fulcrum. It was time for him to thaw.