“I thought I told you never to come back here!”
“Yeah, you did. But we need to talk.”
“Get out! Guards!”
Kellaro felt the Imperial Guards surround him and grab his arms. He quickly fused his magnet boots to the floor, but made no other move, his eyes seeking Brant’s. He said quietly, “I found the fugitives.”
“You did?” Brant paused, breathless, then he gestured the Guards to step back again, for Kellaro to step inside his office. When Kellaro followed, and the door sealed shut, Brant said, “And then… what? Do you have them here with you now?”
“No. They, um, they got away. But I still want to talk to you.”
Brant growled. “I should throw you out on your ear now…”
“But you won’t.” Would he? Kellaro took a steadying breath, boring into Brant’s gaze. “Brant… you told me, when I left here last, that you had other friends that would look after you when I couldn’t. It was them, wasn’t it?”
Brant turned away, retreating to the rain-streaked window at the back of the office. “Yes.”
“Well, they still care about you. And I think you are insane not to follow them.” Kellaro took another breath. He had been practicing this speech all the way to Dromund Kaas, and now he jumped right into it. “I can’t believe that you just abandoned them. The fact that your station mattered more to you than your frie–“
“You think I want this?” Brant interrupted him, whipping around. “You think I really want this? This title, this planet, this command?”
“I–“
“Well, I don’t! And I never did! But what else am I left with–“
“But why didn’t you just–“
Brant cut him off again. “I wanted a home for my family! Do you understand? I wanted my wife by my side. To hold her and… touch her and… I wanted to be left alone. My family, left alone! I never chose this… being Sith… never chose my master; he chose me. I never wanted to kill them…! …but there was no other way. There was never any other way!”
Kellaro fell silent, his speech dying in his throat. He knew Brant was speaking of their parents, what his master had forced him to do to them. Brant’s voice had turned hysterical now, climbing up and down the octave scale erratically. Kellaro felt each of Brant’s words like a punch to the stomach, but he didn’t speak. His brother needed this, and it wasn’t for Kellaro to interrupt.
“I wasn’t strong enough. They suffered because of me. They all suffered… you don’t understand. They’d put…badly drawn pictures in my hands, they’d… just a bunch of… scribbles. Brown and black… scribbles, and the only way you knew it was me was because they had written ‘Dad’ under them. They’d written… When the thunder came too loud and I’d hold them… when they were sick, I’d hold them… and no one’s there to hold them anymore. They are slaves or worse. They are dead. And it’s my fault… all my fault.”
“No…” said Kellaro softly.
Brant looked at him, but he wasn’t really looking at him. “They never deserved it. Never deserved… me…” He shuddered, and then suddenly his eyes flared a bright, poisonous yellow, and he snarled, and Kellaro could almost feel the room darken around them as Brant seethed. “But these traitors…! Sarak and Venzeri, they are no innocents. They chose this. They could have left off this foolish notion, killed that apprentice, but they chose this!”
“They wanted you to leave with them,” Kellaro interjected quietly.
Brant didn’t answer, collapsing his head into his hands and making a noise like the squeak of a badly aligned door squeezing into its frame. “…Sarak once told me I would have to gain enough power to one day challenge Hu’izei and take my children back… but he didn’t understand. I’m not that powerful, Kellaro. I will never be. There is no way to fight… not him, not the Emperor. The Lord Herald…”
“Yet here you are now,” said Kellaro entreatingly, taking a step closer. “All the Imperial Guardsmen in the galaxy and still those three are out there somewhere, evading your grasp. They are probably halfway into the Core Worlds by now, with the protection of the Jedi. You’d never catch them there, would you? You’d have to take on the whole Republic yourself, and if the Empire could do that, they already would have.” The Mandalorian took several more steps, until he was standing next to Brant, and clasped a heavy hand down on his shoulder. “And you could’ve been right there with them, you know.”
Brant shook his head. “So suffer there, instead of suffer here?” was all he said.
Kellaro groaned. “Yes, suffer, but at least they wouldn’t force you to do even worse. You’d be free. You wouldn’t be able to undo the past, Brant, but at least you’d be free!”
Brant slowly looked up at him, scowling, wrenching his shoulder out of his grasp. “You, too, talk like a traitor.”
“No, I talk about someone who cares about you! And what you want. Your family.”
Brant looked down and shook his head. Kellaro winced.
“You know I saw Dad go through everything you are now.”
Brant looked up, wary.
“When he learned you had been taken, it almost broke him. I asked him why we didn’t just go after you.”
“And what did he say?” growled Brant.
“He said… if they had been able to find us once, take you from us, they’d just do the same thing all over again, and probably kill us all for our trouble. And by then, you’d probably be brainwashed into Sith ways yourself. He chose… something else. He came back to Imperial space, to find you, to… to be there for you, help you work things out. Until you were strong enough to break the chains the Sith laid on you. He always had faith that you would.”
“So putting him on my master’s radar. I guess his faith in me came to nothing,” Brant said bitterly. “I killed him.”
Kellaro looked up. “And you felt guilt doing it.”
“Big deal…”
“It’s the biggest deal! It’s what still separates you from them!”
“So I should let go of it.” Brant paced away, straightening up and coming to a stop before the banner of the Imperial hexagon. He felt Karkemir rising inside of him, offering… offering to take it all away. It was as easy as relinquishing his conscious to the hold of the spirit’s…
“You would no longer be you.” His words were defeated, but Kellaro couldn’t have known what they meant to Brant. Yes… give up the guilt… let Karkemir take him over… and Brant would cease to be. He’d be weak like his father, those many decades ago, giving in to the Dark Side himself. Kyolath had become Sith, and that specter would haunt his children forever after.
When Brant had bound Karkemir to him, the shade of the Dark Side that had once tormented his father, Brant had promised the spirit he would never let it win, that he would conquer it, tame it — yet here he was, doing the exact opposite.
But how could he possibly go on with the burden of guilt and the loneliness that was his fate now…?
“There is no other way,” he finally said to Kellaro. He started walking towards the door. “You can stay here for a day, recover your strength. But then you must leave. And I have to… return to my work.”
Kellaro’s shoulders dropped. Brant keyed his personal code into the door, opening it, and then making it lock from the inside out, so that no one would be able to come in but him once it closed again; Kellaro would be safe until he chose to leave.
If he knew what was good for him, he would leave and not come back. If nothing else, the legacy of the Sith would die with Brant.