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Language:
English
Series:
Part 6 of Andor Drabbles
Collections:
/r/FanFiction Daily Prompt Collections
Stats:
Published:
2025-05-28
Words:
400
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
23
Kudos:
16
Bookmarks:
1
Hits:
88

If You Have Ghosts

Summary:

... then you have everything. (RIP Roky Erickson)

Notes:

Inspired by Zdzisław Beksiński's untitled painting for the art challenge over on r/fanfiction on Reddit. 400 word limit.

Work Text:

Everywhere Luthen touched was poison, but he was not the source. It seeped into the gallery from the artifacts shipped in from planets the Empire had sacked on the sly, from the guests who chatted inanely with Kleya and him, from the laugh that bubbled up from his throat when he wanted nothing more than to scream at the horror surrounding him. The restrained, calm palette of the fashionable edge of town could do nothing to hide the malice that twined through the planet, threading through every level of Coruscant until it bound the planet to darkness, grasping, fangs unleashed.

They should have poisoned him already. They’d been in the shop before, looking for trinkets for their paramours, souvenirs for their families back on worlds with numbers alongside the names and irrelevance dripping off the very syllables of the names. But he laughed at their jokes, feeling another part of his soul disintegrate, dropping into the void all the way down in Coruscant’s core.

It would have been easy to stop fighting. Easy to play along like the Empire wanted. It was almost tempting, sometimes. But the galaxy would remind him. A Stormtrooper would shove an old woman. An officer would threaten to slaughter the family of a contact showing up late. It would remind him of his purpose and his place in the galaxy. It was a shame, Luthen thought, that he could not always remember that. Some part of him was still human, still fallible, still not immune to the darkness he had once served. He was no diathim, no creature of light, but he remembered the screams and the horror in the marshes of Kleya’s home, and knew he would no longer serve the ghosts inside him. They would serve him. He would give them no alternative.

Always an unnervingly short speeder ride away, the great beast of the Imperial Palace squatted foursquare like a baleful god. It did not take the Force to feel its power. It was impossible to escape, so it would have to be faced and reckoned with. Luthen took the speeders closest to the Palace Court, daring the Empire to notice him, and they did not act. He did not figure into the galaxy’s plans, but the galaxy certainly figured in his. He would take an axe to the chokehold of crawling toxin, even if he cut his throat in the process.

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