Something Like Fate (Fan Fiction)

## Introduction

**Author:** Nat Kotas

**Characters:** Candrai Enn'ado, Tamor'a, Aelias Alin

**Setting:** passenger transport leaving Naboo, c. 13BBY

## Story

It was for the best, they had both agreed.

This world had been their home for more than three years, but they were no longer safe. Things had changed. Too much attention had been drawn from their allies among the local insurgents and native swamp-dwellers. Those loyal to the evil regime had multiplied.

No, they certainly were not safe here any longer. But was it really for the best?

The man held the child, the young ruddy-faced toddler, with hands that had seen far too much violence. “This is not the life we wanted for you,” he whispered. “This is not the life your father had wanted.”

The woman beside him knew what he was thinking. She might as well have been reading his mind; it wouldn’t have been the first time. “It’s for the best,” she said mechanically, the mantra they had unwillingly procured for themselves.

The words caused the man to frown. How many times had they said that, how many times after all they’d been through and after all they’d done?

The man was reminded of his many transgressions, of his temptation and how he had succumbed to the darkness. Even after his redemption, the man remembered the part he played in the downfall of others; he vividly recalled the children killed by an enemy he had failed to protect them from. He winced to think of the lives taken in that battle, this very child in his arms, whose parents were killed—one immediately, the other not so long afterward.

The man thought about the natives he had trained against the evils of their day; he had forged warriors, but to what end would they ultimately fail? More criminal masterminds, more deranged knights-errant? Or would they be desolated (as so many before them) under the evil regime’s ruthless galactic conquest?

The man then considered his most recent student. This was the one he had sent away to survive amidst a rag-tag group of adventure-seekers, on a planet in the very heart of that same evil regime. He had envisioned that student’s ruin, and desperately sought to spare him of that. Or had he unknowingly sent the young man straight to his demise?

And now… now the man was fleeing his new job, home, and life to escape the impending doom that was ever encroaching upon them. They had to leave. What choice did they have?

The worst part of all was yet to follow. The man knew that he was slipping. He was not the father this boy needed, he never could be. He was not the husband his wife needed, for there was too much darkness left in his heart, no matter how diligently he fought to purge it from within.

He saw the brokenness that lay between them all, as if his inner sight made tangible the invisible threads that once bound them together. He was hurt, and she was hurt. He had fallen and still felt the slimy shame of his past. She had been forced to slay her protégé and this after suffering the deepest of betrayals.

We’re too broken, the man mused, watching her dark eyes as she took the child from his arms. She caught his stare, and paused, the mutual understanding as clear as crystal, as mournful and final as a loon’s call.

They would find a safe place for the child. They would take a break from their attempts of parenting and from their marriage of play-acting. They would leave no clues to their former lives, nothing to tie them to their past.

They had already destroyed their iconic weapons, had burned their order’s robes. They would shroud themselves in new identities and quench the inner sight which once so strongly defined them.

Something like Fate was tugging at the heart of Candrai Enn’ado, and he knew that soon he would know why. He would embrace it, even if it meant doing so alone.

It was for the best.