Star Wars 1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer—I do not own _Star Wars._ Disney does.

**Warning**—There are incidences of violence and some gore in future chapters.

Summary—I have always been fascinated by the character of Kyp Durron, and I wanted to dip my toes into the largely unexplored field that was his life prior to his introduction in Kevin J. Anderson's novel _Jedi Search. _This is more a series of vignettes/one-shots than an actual fic, merely my take on a few 'essence points' in this character's life, defining moments that helped shape him into who he is.

Author's Note—This piece may also be considered a 'prequel' of sorts to a larger work that I am working on, that I will (hopefully) begin posting sometime this summer.

* * *

**Regret and Remembrance**

Chapter 1—

"Sunrise"

The sun is rising over Coruscant.

Behind the elegantly towering spires and columns, the fiery red orb creeps up over the horizon, pushing orange-, pink- and yellow-tinted clouds ahead of it into the lightening grey sky. Light reflects from shining, mirror-like durasteel surfaces, almost blinding to the eye as Coruscant Prime heralds the beginning of another day on the city-planet that never sleeps. In the middle of the Senate district, at the very heart of the glittering city, the Imperial Palace dominates the landscape, its dazzling white and silver spires seeming to brush the dome of the sky. Once the crown jewel of a now-dying Empire, the Imperial Palace remains grand and imposing; indeed, the marvel of engineering and architecture remains an epicenter of sorts for Coruscant…and a testament to a long and brutal legacy.

On one of the many luxurious balconies of the Imperial Palace, a boy sits on a chair overlooking the city, his slight form wrapped in a blanket. Slender but heavily-callused hands hold the cloth in place, his chin nestled in the voluminous folds pooling around his neck. His high cheekbones, the finely angular planes and angles of his face, and slightly long, haughty nose hint at an aristocratic heritage—he seems like some sort of brooding prince watching the sun rise on the land that he rules. Truly, this would be a semi-logical assumption, based upon where he sits. Paupers, after all, do _not _live in the Imperial Palace, and certainly no servant would behave so presumptuously as to luxuriously repose upon a balcony in one of the most opulent wings of the Palace during the early morning hours when there remain many a task to finish.

However, upon closer inspection, the youth appears…less aristocratic. His face is thin, his sharply defined cheekbones protruding from under tightly stretched skin, his face almost …_pinched_, somehow—yet tough. No healthy color suffuses his lean cheeks, his flesh glows milky-white and almost chalky, as if lack of light has leeched all color from his skin, leaving it colorless. Long, dark lashes frame narrowed, assessing eyes the color of warm earth.

They are not a boy's eyes, however.

An brutal, starved curiosity…almost like a certain _hunger, _shines in their depths as he drinks in the sight of the rising sun, like a man who, after lacking proper food for a long time, feels compelled to sit and stare at the feast suddenly set before him in order to assure himself that what he is experiencing is, indeed, real. Behind the curious hunger, however, lurks something infinitely darker-a sort of deep, cold _hardness_, the sort borne of much prolonged suffering—a look that most certainly does not belong in the eyes of a youth of his mere sixteen years.

Ancient eyes in a young face, the eyes of a boy forced into manhood far before he should ever have had to consider the concept. The eyes of one who survived when others who deemed themselves amongst the ranks of the strong weakened and died. The eyes of one living less than half of an existence while refusing to be less than half of an entity.

And yet, a certain profound contemplation flashes within the dark, churning depths, a certain shade of…_gratefulness_—but shadowed by regret and bitter remembrance. For everyone has a story, and his is not the sort to be forgotten easily, indeed, one might say that his has scarred him, carved indelible marks onto his person he could not erase even if he attempted to.

So many memories, carved into his heart. His future stretches out before him, a glittering promise after a emergence from a long and cruel darkness, and yet he cannot forget what lies behind, though it is nothing but a legacy of loss and anguish.

Indeed, even now, newly liberated, watching the sun break over the horizon, he is thinking of times long past. Of those left behind, fallen and buried in the sands of the past, whose memories yet live on within him. Of those who did not live to see the sun rise.

His lean hands, palms callused, roughened with peeling skin and scarred, reflexively grip the garment about him, his eyes darkening, as the glowing orb pulses up over the horizon, sending deep-orange rays flooding over the landscape. The light glints off the youth's ragged black hair, lending a glow to his milky skin and bringing out the pale orange flecks surrounding his pupils, making them glow like fire.

His jaw clenches and he pulls his lip between his teeth, leaving the flesh grooved and white before it reddens angrily as it slips between his teeth, unblinkingly studying the rising sun. Coruscant looks as if fire it baptizing it, the brilliant orange flaring over the buildings and pulsing forward like a living beast breathing flame, and he cannot help but remember when the only warmth, the only fire that remained to him was the pulsing flame burning deep next to his heart, the stubborn flame that not even the worst the Empire had to offer could stamp out.

Even now, it burns, flickering in time to his breath, matching the rise and fall of his thin chest. In. Out. Pulsing with the sun's rays. Throbbing in time to his beating heart. The hearts of so many others stopped long ago. Their flames burned out, leaving them shells, or else their blood ran red, spilled brutally upon the black stone. Like his mother's. And his father's. Not as if there was not many a time when hisown heart nearly ceased to constrict as well. Times when he felt sure his name the passage of time and history would rub out his name, that he was destined to fall into the dust as another faceless entity, the victim of too much non-existence and too much abuse. That he would never breathe free air again, or enjoy something as simple as a sunrise. But he lived while others died, survived when others perished….and like all other survivors, he has a story.

His name is Zekyprius Durron, and there were many days he was sure he would _never _live to see the sun rising again.

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A/N: And there you have the first chapter. The remaining chapters will be posted in chronological order, but I thought it would be interesting to begin the story in the present and then go back and tell what happened in the past to bring the protagonist to this point...so that is why things are the way they are. Any feedback would be much appreciated...critique and constructive criticism are much appreciated.

-Sabre


	2. Chapter 2

**Regret and Remembrance **

Chapter 2-

"White"

It is a _white_ day, the day the storm-troopers take him prisoner.

Kyp Durron thinks it strange that on a day fire burned _orange_ across the sky and blood ran _red_ in the streets as the storm-troopers cut down the inhabitants of his home-planet what he remembers best is the _white_.

White armor. White moonlight. White stars.

All white.

* * *

This is how it happens.

As he learns so brutally on that day, the Galactic Empire functions according to an inexorable code of rules. The Emperor Palpatine and his minions, who cast a long shadow over the galaxy—and who will continue to do so after their deaths—cannot tolerate dissent in _any_ shape or form. Like most dictators, the hold their political power like a mother clutching onto the child about to be ripped from her arms, and any questioning or complaints_ infuriates_ them. As many other powerful men before them, they has come to think of themselves as…_absolute_—able to make the rules and hold life and death in the palms of their hands. To obey the Empire is to live, and to disobey is to die. It is all very _simple_, really.

So when the citizens of Deyer dare to protest the Ghorman Massacre, the Empire reacts _decisively_, scrambling to crush the rats who would dare question the Empire's actions in a storm of fury. The local Imperial garrison calls for backup, ships rain down fire from the sky, setting the capital city of Freiya _ablaze_, and the white horde of storm-troopers descend upon the houses of the citizens with impunity, barely stopping to read a one-line arrest warrant before they stun and drag their victims out into the streets for deportation to an unknown location. Those who dare resist are cut down _without _mercy.

It is all very…_simple_, really. The Empire wins and Deyer loses, and the citizens of the peaceful aquatic world must…bear the consequences of their loss…_without _any hope of aid.

It is how young Kyp Durron finds himself huddled in his bed one night shuddering as he feels the earth shaking beneath him for the thousand and first time that day. It has been seven days since Empire…_attacked_ Deyer…and for the same number of days he has lived in terrible fear, trembling at every foreign sound and wincing as he hears cries drift up to his family's apartment from the streets and canals. Shivering, he burrows a little closer to the warmth emanating from his brother's side, and relaxes slightly when the older boy turns over on the mattress, wrapping an arm around his small shoulders before pulling him firmly against his warm chest. Zeth's breathing pulses even and steady, even though he twitches with fear, and the rhythm that is one of Kyp's first memories calms him enough to close his eyes. Nonetheless, terror churns the remains of his last meal in his stomach, bringing a sour taste to the back of his throat and making icy prickles run like tiny needles over his skin. _I'm safe, _he tries to tell himself, attempting to visualize the most peaceful memory he has, but the phantom rumblings drifting through the window makes reaching for those memories difficult. _Dad and Mom and Zeth are all here, and the storm-troopers haven't come for us yet, so maybe they don't think we did anything wrong. _

Despite his youth, however, he realizes that is only wishful thinking at best, and denial at worst. His parents hold positions on the city council, and prior to the Imperial crackdown they made no secret of their anti-Imperial stance; therefore, it's probably only a matter of time before the troopers melt down their door and storm in and take them all away.

As if to validate his sudden suspicions, the bed and the ground beneath him shakes violently as the sound of an explosion splits the air, making his ears ache and ring horribly at the same time. His head spins as he starts up in bed, shaking, just in time to see, through the window, flames billow up into the sky several hundred meters away, black smoke pluming up from the orange-red inferno in great billows. He stares horrified, wrinkling his nose as the acrid smell of smoke and burning things scorches the sensitive lining of his nose. Tears scald the corners of his eyes.

Zeth wraps a warm hand around his arm and tugs his brother back down onto the bed, but Kyp knows he has no hope of sleeping tonight. Not after this. _Please, I don't want to die, _he thinks desperately as he stares up in horror at the red flames lighting up the dark night sky spangled with stars, flinching once more as he hears the unmistakable _bang bang bang_ of artillery shells exploding somewhere far off in the city. Half-dazedly he wonders how in the hell his city became another shade of Hades, instead of the safe haven he's always known.

He hates it, and he hates the ones doing this even _more._

"Go to sleep, Kyp," Zeth murmurs softly in his ear, his low voice soothing, but subdued, so unlike his natural jovial and mischievous tones. "I don't think they'll be shelling anymore tonight."

Somehow, Kyp manages to relax enough to eventually drop off to sleep, wrapped in his brother's warm arms, syncing his breaths to the steady rise and fall of Zeth's chest. It's the last time for eight years he'll ever feel even remotely safe.

* * *

The sensation of something hard and cold striking his face, burning a streak of _fire_ across his cheeks, jerks him out of sleep, and when he opens his eyes, all he sees is a terrible, all-consuming white…._white_—the color of fear. A horrible, blinding white light shines into his face and he reflexively squints as stars dance in front of his aching eyes, recalling fuzzily that he is _sure_ Zeth turned off the lights before they went to bed. He barely has time to process this thought before a cold, hard appendage wraps around his shoulder and hauls him to the edge of the bed in one smooth motion before releasing him as he thuds to the floor painfully, his head spinning with the sudden movement.

The cold surface of the floor sends what feels like cold stabbing little needles skittering up his limbs as he lands half on his hands and knees, and he yelps, blinking wildly as he looks up to see his assailant.

Then, he _screams. _

Screams as he meets soulless black orbs that cover eyes, screams as horror pulses through him as his eyes rove over the thick white breathing apparatus that looks like some sort of grotesque mouth, screams as he stares at the white armor of the storm-trooper standing over him in his own bedroom. Sharp, aching pain blossoms in his side like a red flower as a white boot connects with his side. "Get up off the floor, you rat," a strange flat voice emanates from the helmet. "Get dressed! Now!"

Kyp cringes backwards as the storm-trooper raises his weapon.

He glances around the room, and makes out the form of his brother kneeling in the shadows by the doorway, his hands on his head. Another storm-trooper stands behind him, the black barrel of his weapon pressed firmly to the back of his brother's head, and although his face is turned away, Kyp can see the fear written in every line of his brother's lean, taut body.

He never knows how he gets off the floor that night, how he manages to find his clothes and put on his boots, but he remembers with shocking clarity the drops of cold sweat that trickle down his back, leaving a cold damp trail in their wake, when the storm-trooper presses the barrel of his weapon against his back. The muzzle is hard, and it's _cold_—colder than anything he's ever felt before, and he feels as if Death itself is brushing its ghostly fingers against his back as he stumbles towards the door of the room in the dimness.

Tears cloud his vision for the second time this night as he steps over the threshold of his room, the film thickening until they overflow, burning his eyes and flowing down his cheeks, leaving warm wet trails in their wake as they roll down to drip off his chin. The only light in the hall is the blinding white light in the storm-trooper's hand, and Kyp notes how stiff and horrible and white the storm-trooper's back before him looks, and how foreboding the thudding of their footsteps sound as the storm-troopers march them down the corridor. He feels as if he is walking into a dark unknown where the rules are different and a sense of strange fulfillment of his own dread as he walks away from everything he has known and loved since his birth. _I don't want to die, _he thinks desperately as the storm-trooper jams the cold circle against his back a little more firmly, and terror temporarily seizes his muscles and he trembles uncontrollably, horror pulsing through him as he considers what should happen if the storm-trooper should pull that terrible trigger, or if the one in front should kill his brother. _Please, please, please, _he pleads silently, _don't let them kill Zeth, don't let them kill mom or dad. _

The coldness remains at his back and the white—_white _armor, the personification of his worst nightmare—before him as he stumbles down the corridor, down the staircase in the darkness of the home that now feels foreign where it once felt familiar, as if this house is not his anymore but now a foreign enclave where he is a stranger within its walls. Only later, much later does it occur to him that he should have said goodbye to the dwelling that had sheltered him for eight years, when any hope of reclaiming the past was long gone.

Down the staircase, through the halls, through the dining room where the _white_ moonlight and starlight pour through the windows and bathe the tableau in a ghostly light. Years later, when he tries to remember what the dining room looked like that night, he cannot remember a damn thing, because all he saw was the way the white light reflected off the armor of the storm-trooper ahead of him and made him seem even larger and more frightening, like a person about to crush an insect beneath his heel. He stumbles as he reaches the door that leads from the dining room to the living room, and it's the first time he can even feel his legs since the storm-trooper entered his room, red pain shooting through his shoulder like a dart as he clumsily collides with the wall. _Pain is red_, he thinks for a moment, just before more red pain explodes in the center of his back as the storm-trooper jams the blaster harder against his tender flesh. He feels his skin bruising, sending aches radiating through his back and up into his sinewy shoulders as the man growls, "Move it, pig!" as if talking to an animal, "Stop dawdling!"

Tears burning his eyes once more, he blinks and they run down his cheeks as he lurches into the living room, a sudden indignation flaring up in him, and for a moment the _crimson_ anger at being addressed like an animal temporarily overrules the white fear eating his insides. _I have a name! _Something in him longs to shout as royal _blue_ dignity flares in his chest, but something—_lavender_ prudence—keeps him silent.

Inside the living room, it shines even whiter, and the fear numbing his muscles and sealing his lips as surely as if he's gagged presses down on his young back even more oppressively. On the floor on the far side of the room lies what used to be the front door, the edges of the metal slab glowing red around the edges as smoke curls up in little black wisps, filling the room with a stench of scorched metal which sears his nostrils and increases the flow of crystal already streaming down his cheeks. Cold air gusts in through the aperture, and on the sea meters from the door he can see boats lit with massive white orbs that nearly blind him and make him blink as he turns his head away. Next to the couch his parents kneel, their hands on their heads, while one more storm-trooper stands behind them, blaster at the ready, pointed at the backs of his parents' heads.

Powerlessness sweeps over him. If his parents have fallen, what chance does he have? He will be swept away by the white.

He whimpers slightly as his head begins to ache violently, a great swelling, cracking pain filing his skull because there is just too much _white_, too much fear. Darkness presses in at the corners of his eyes, and he wants to let it sweep him under and hide him from the white. But then his father turns his head fractionally, just enough so that his dark brown eyes lock with Kyp's and everything around them fades to the background for a moment as his father's eyes bore into his own. They are calm, controlled, and there is not one bit of white in the dark pupils—an anchor amidst the storm rising around him. _Be brave, _those eyes say, and for a moment he thinks everything may turn out alright before the terrible white intrudes again, chilling his stomach.

"Is this everyone?" the storm-trooper behind his father drones mechanically, apparently posing the question to the storm-troopers holding him and his brother hostage.

"Everyone, sir," the storm-trooper behind him confirms in his terrible mechanical voice. "There was nothing upstairs except the boy and this runt."

Red rage provoked by the slur boils in his insides; he stews with fury at the continuous insults. _I may be small for my age but I'm strong, _he hisses mentally, but the hot anger dies down into embers as he realizes with a flood of _grey_ despair that it will do him absolutely no good to protest. He is helpless in the ocean of the white, helpless in the grasps of his captors and there is precious little he can do about that.

"Valus and Calla Durron," the storm-trooper holding his parents hostage intones, "you are both charged with high treason against His Imperial Majesty's Galactic Empire, and are therefore under arrest." It sounds horribly final as he says it, Kyp thinks, as if he is announcing the end of an era, and he senses somewhere deep within him that this single sentence snuffs out the light he's lived in, and opens the door to the cold darkness he once dreamed about, months ago.

His eyes widen with shock as his father half-laughs, the sound raspy and choked-sounding. "I think you've already arrested us, so why the hell are you talking about it?" His tone is bitter, bitter as wormwood, terrible and foreign intonations coloring every cadence of his familiar deep voice, and Kyp _screams_ in horror, the sound grating on his ears like the sound of nails on a chalkboard, as the storm-trooper raises his blaster, the trigger clicking as he pulls it back. A zinging sound rings in his ears as a burst of blue bolts shoots from the muzzle of the black weapon, hitting his father in the back of the head at point-blank range. His father seems to fall in slow motion, his eyes shutting as his head falls forward and his hands wobble before he crumples to a heap on the floor with a thud.

Kyp screams. Again.

_We're all going to die, we're all going to die, we're all going to die_ he thinks but realizes, just as the trooper levels his blaster at his mother's head, that the shots fired into his father's head are stun bolts, and he still lives, and a wild _yellow_ hope rises in his chest and floods his being that leaves his legs feeling jellylike. He barely has time to process this, however, before Zeth is leaping forward, his taut body coiling and springing like a cat's, shouting in a terrible, desperate, hoarse voice Kyp has never heard before "No!" as blue bolts lance out of the muzzle of the second blaster and enter the back of his mother's head. She sways for a moment like a reed in the wind before she crumples forward, and then the storm-trooper raises and levels his blaster, the terrible black barrel swinging in the light like a thing possessed, pointing at his brother's chest and discharging a staccato burst of the blue bolts.

The bolts catch Zeth in the chest just as reaches their prone mother's side, and his brother lets out a sort of strangled cry as he takes one stumbling step backward before his legs give out and he falls…_twisted_, to land partly on his side and partly on his back on the ground, stretched out in a grotesque pose.

Kyp screams one more time before a sharp pain shoots through the back of his head that brings hot saliva pouring into his mouth as he clenches his jaw involuntarily, and a strange tingling numbness spreads over his body as the ground rushes up at him.

The last thing he remembers seeing is how horribly white the moonlight and starlight looks shining upon the prone bodies of those he loves best before the blackness swallows him up.

He won't see the sun again for eight years.

* * *

A/N: Any feedback is appreciated as always. As an aside, I'm no expert on color symbolism, so if some of the colors here represent incorrect things, I apologize! I just used the colors that I personally associate with certain emotions.


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