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The Park, Thursday Afternoon

Yeah. So. Talking to someone about the whole Jedi-rebuilding thing. Great idea. Good way to actually be helpful. It was fine! Fine.

Jack had even curated a whole thrash metal playlist for the morning and the walk here just to get him into the right fine mindset (nothing cured insecurity like some Anthr-- okay, maybe the phrasing wasn't great on that one), but of course someone's musical tastes had completely ruined his algorithm. By the time he was actually walking to the park - early, way too early - the playlist had finished and he had Tim McIlrath sing-yelling Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? Is the violence in our nature just the image of our maker? in his ears, memories of the weekend dancing around in his head.

He sat down on the bench. Set his lightsabers down beside him, and then - after a moment - reached up to take out the earbud. "We're not stories, we're not actors, we're awake and in control," he mumbled to himself. And then a few more times, for good measure.

Okay? Okay.

Time to wait for Rey.

[[ expecting one, but open! ]]

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Rey showed up a few minutes later, lightsaber clipped at her waist, greeting him with, "I haven't kept you waiting, have I?"

"Nah, I got here early," Jack said, and blinked - however briefly.

Look, sometimes the fact casual truths actually managed to make it out of his mouth these days still came as a surprise to him.

"How're you doing?" he asked, looking up at her.

Rey considered how to answer that, since she'd only just met him and he wasn't getting all of that dumped on him.

"It's been a strange week. I went to see an old temple. A lot of history there," she said. "How are you doing?"

Probably the better question, whether she knew it or not.

Jack let out a little sigh, and then laughed - rueful. "I have good days and bad days," he said, "Right now, I think I'm having a middle day. Been trying to tie up some loose ends before I go home for the rest of the year, it's knocking some stuff loose."

Vague, but honest.

"And I've been thinking about what to tell you," he added. "My own journey with the Jedi has been rocky, to say the least."

"If it helps at all, I've heard more than a few things about rocky journeys with the Jedi," she said.

"Yeah, let's not get into my feelings about the cyclical nature of Jedi fuck-ups this early in the conversation," Jack said wryly, sitting forward, his feet swaying with the movement. "How much do you know about my time? It's fine if the answer is 'nothing', I was dead like four millennia before you were born."

"Pretty much nothing," she said with a nod. "Not a lot of history books where I come from."

"Right, so I'm going to try to keep the history short, just the important context," Jack said.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "We had a lot of wars," he said. "About-- Fifty? Sixty? Years ago, a Jedi named Exar Kun got into a number of scrapes, turned to the Dark Side along the way, and did what Sith Lords do, which is try to take over the galaxy. The Jedi defeated him, but not before he turned a few of their number and killed a lot of the rest. That was War 1. A couple decades later, the Mandalorians invaded the Republic. That was War 2. I fought in that one."

Right. Keeping this short and sweet. He'd already given himself a challenge.

"The Jedi were terrified of what had happened to those kids that fell back in War 1, so they refused to get involved," he said. "A Knight called Revan disagreed. He took a bunch of other young Knights, joined the Republic against the Mandalorians, and beat them. In the process, as you do, everyone involved in the war got horribly traumatized. Revan and his Knights fell to the Dark Side, he took whatever soldiers were loyal to him with him to the Unknown Regions for a year. Then he came back and attacked the Republic and the Order himself and tried to convert as many Jedi as he could. That was War 3."

He rubbed his shoulder. "By the end of War 3, the Republic was broken, the smattering of Jedi still left alive had gone undercover, and the people dubbed that war 'the Jedi Civil War'."

He looked up at Rey. "That's the basics," he said. "Too much? Too little?"

"Maybe just enough," she said, since she already had heard something that went against something she'd kind of decided. "Does that mean you went on your own away from the Jedi for War 2?"

Yeaaah.

Jack looked up at the sky for a second. Making some decisions for himself.

He nudged the squirrels away with the Force.

"No," he said. "I was a Republic soldier. I didn't know I was Force sensitive yet. I was angry, hurt, traumatized. Like most of the people around me, I blamed the Jedi Order and the Republic for all the destruction I'd seen. So I went with Revan, became an assassin in his army. Two years in, one of my targets, a Jedi, managed to crack open my brain - metaphorically speaking - revealed my Force sensitivity, and told me to run. Because Revan was looking for Force sensitives to fully break to the Dark Side to help beef up his army. And I was already three quarters of the way there."

He picked at the edge of his glove.

"I did what she told me," he said. "I ran. I managed to make it here, and I hid for a long time."

Edited 2025-08-14 13:51 (UTC)

"And you were... living in the space between dark and light?" she asked.

~~With a literal grey background on his character info page and everything.~~

"Pretty much," Jack agreed, with a little nod. "There's only one Jedi who participated in War 2 who managed to avoid War 3. Meetra Surik, the woman who taught me, who made me a Jedi. And she only got out of it because the pain the war caused - the pain she caused, at its climax - was so bad, she instinctively severed her connection to the Force. Burned it out of herself to escape all that suffering."

Edited 2025-08-14 14:38 (UTC)

"I've heard of people cutting themselves ooff from the Force, but not permanently," Rey said, frowning. "I didn't know you could do it through trauma."

"Apparently you can, if you wind pulling the trigger on a bomb that kills a hundred thousand people and most of a planet, at the end of a long war full of lots of tinier triggers and tinier bombs," Jack said. A little more clinical, this go-around.

He shook his head. "This is something a lot of the on-island and post-island Jedi miss, I think," he said. "Usually they were raised this way, right? They think going from violent crisis to violent crisis is normal. Like suffering is just a part of life you have to brute-force your way through. They don't think about the damage, how it adds up. Especially when you're already plugged as deeply into the universe as we are."

It was weird, saying this aloud. He'd never been able to find the clarity to really think about all of this until he'd left their galaxy for good, and then there hadn't been any other Jedi to talk to about it.

Great. Four minutes in and he already felt like he owed Rey an apology for dumping all this baggage on her.

"From what I've heard in talking to people, they actually do," she said. "They're just good at compartmentalizing because they've been doing it forever."

Rey was a prodigy there, really.

"Compartmentalizing is not the same as sitting with it," Jack said. "Or taking the time to heal from what you've seen. Compartmentalizing's fine as long as your head's stable and your support system is holding and you get hit within your tolerance."

He waved vaguely at himself.

"You lose any of those things for a second, and you wind up like me," he said. "Or Meetra Surik."

Edited 2025-08-14 15:44 (UTC)

"The support system is probably another point in favor of having some attachments," she said. "You said you only hid out for a while?"

"I'd say I'm pro-attachments and pro-downtime, yeah," Jack said. "And maybe pro-Jedi mental healthcare."

And no longer running through the halls yelling nobody should be a Jedi, so hey.

But he sat back, and tried to get himself back on track. Answer her actual questions, instead of pontificating. "I was here for a couple of years," he said. "Then I wound up back in my galaxy. It'd gotten quiet, I thought, though apparently something was going around picking off Jedi in the background. It got bad enough that eventually, something pulled Meetra back from wherever the hell she'd been hiding out. She recruited me and a creepy old ex-Sith lady by accident, then went looking for the survivors. The 'lost Jedi'."

Edited 2025-08-14 16:56 (UTC)

"How do you even go about finding them?"

Not that Rey was having an issue there or anything.

"Well, in our case, one of the remaining Jedi shot us down, and she had the files for the surviving Jedi Masters locked up in her system," Jack said. "Of course, in the end, the masters were either useless or dead and they tried to stab her in the back. But in the process of looking for them, she found us. A bunch of Force sensitives who, for whatever reasons, fell through the cracks when the Order was coming apart. I guess it was the Force guiding her after all, or something."

"I've been waiting for something like that," she said, her tone a touch wry.

"The Force works in mysterious ways," Jack said, wiggling his fingers. "Maybe it's just not time yet."

"That's what I keep telling myself." Not that she wanted to leave, and she'd have to in that case, but she felt like it should be happening by now.

"So, she trained you one on one?"

"There were six of us, by the end of it," Jack shared. "She did the best she could with us individually in the time she had."

He rubbed the back of his neck. "We didn't exactly all get along, so team sparring seemed like a great way to get someone killed, you know?"

"Understandable," she agreed, while also making a mental note about team sparring. "So not an ideal situation overall?"

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The Park, Thursday Afternoon

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