The Little Wooden Memory Box

[Writer]

The Little Wooden Memory Box

by Flamehart and Writer

 

 

 

“You know, I never thought I’d move...” Reibe Vailar stood at the window of the little apartment she’d known as home. It was true, she’d been away from home a great deal, especially during the Empire’s twenty-three year dominion. But it was still home. Hearing her soft confession, her old friend Strider Flamehart came to stand beside her.

 

“But here you are,” he said. “It’s for the best, you know.”

 

“I know,” Reibe answered softly. After a moment of silence, Strider looked down at the small box in his hands and extended it to Reibe.

 

“Found this tucked away in a compartment in the...” he began. As he spoke, Reibe turned to see what he’d found. When she saw it, all color drained from her face and she let out her breath as if she’d been punched in the gut.

 

“... in the floor,” she whispered. Slowly, almost reverently, Reibe took the box from Strider. Her eyes fixed on the box and her voice wavering, she told Strider, “I’m gonna need a minute.”

 

Though he was curious to know what could affect the Hunter Leader in this way, Strider knew this wasn’t the time to ask. With a nod, he turned and left the apartment.

 

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

 

Memory is a funny thing. It’s hard to say what you’ll remember as the years pass. Some things you wanted to forget will be remembered forever. Others, though you do everything in your power to remember them are forgotten. For someone like Reibe, genetically altered to achieve a greater lifespan and Force sensitivity than nearly all other Humans, this was all the more evident.

 

“Thirty-three lifetimes,” she whispered aloud. She’d spent the last five minutes trying to work out just exactly how old she was... which was no easy task for someone nearing four thousand years of age. For her, the years passing meant very little; what happened in the time was far more important.

 

The box Strider had found was just barely larger than Reibe’s two small hands put together and about as deep as one of them stood on end... and it had not left her hands since Strider left her with it. Gradually, memories began to flow back to her, memories of things she had both longed and loathed to forget. Tears formed in her eyes, and she decided this was not something she wanted to handle alone.

 

Strider, she called. I need you.

 

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

 

Strider stood outside the apartment quietly, his arms crossed as he gazed out at the streets before him. Coruscant would always be magnificent in structure though horrible in populace, he decided. He had been alive for what was just over five thousand years now, though not because of genetic alteration due to his Sith Hunter status, but rather because of a genetic mutation in his own genes that maintained a youthful, healthy internal and external age of twenty five. Strider understood Reibe must be going through some terrible memory lapses, and began to sort through his own thoughts, all the way back to the times of the Old Republic, when his old master was killed and he was sent two thousand years into the future. He was beginning to ponder what the box could have been when he received the telepath message from Reibe summoning his presence through the Force. He wasted little time, grabbing the doorknob and turning it quickly, forcefully opening the door. He rushed to Reibe’s side, putting both hands on her shoulders and looking at her with his piercing blue eyes.

 

“What’s wrong? Is everything alright?” Strider asked. There was more worry in his tone than she was used to hearing. Strider always knew Reibe could handle herself, but he’d never seen his Leader so weakened by personal strife before, his own concern from his usually stoic shell began to show.

 

“Just... memories,” Reibe answered softly. She looked down at her left hand, where she still wore a plain silver wedding band and began to spin the band slowly around her finger. She glanced down beside her where she’d gently set the box. “I didn’t want to open it... not alone.”

 

Strider firmly held her by her upper arms, and pulled her close in an embrace. He closed his eyes and said in a low voice to her, "Well you aren't alone. Everything's going to be fine, Reibe."

 

With a shaky sigh. Reibe said, "Thank you." She lifted the box and set it on her lap. Then, she slowly flipped the lid open. Inside, Strider could see what looked like the sort of box a ring comes in, a small stack of photos, and a few other seemingly random trinkets. But the photo on top was of Reibe with someone Strider did not recognize.

 

Strider frowned a little and looked over her shoulder. "Who is that, if I may ask?" he inquired curiously. He gently grasped her shoulder, letting her know that he had no intention of pressing into uncomfortable matters and his question was sparked purely by curiosity.

 

Tears came with a small smile to Reibe's face as she answered lovingly, "His name was Hasma. Hasma Raikellii."

 

"Never heard of him. That's a name lost to the history books," he said with a small sense of humor to his tone, knowing it would at least crack a smile. "Tell me more about him," he offered.

 

"In his early twenties, he got mixed up with the wrong crowd," Reibe said thoughtfully. "Oh, Force, it's been ages!" She looked at the photo. "He was twenty-five when I met him... I was a prisoner. He was my guard."

 

"Oh, how romantic," Strider said with a chuckle. "Better to have love and lost than to have never loved at all, right?" he added, a sound of almost reminiscence in his tone, as if he too experienced something similar that he hid beneath his mysterious nature.

 

"Right, I suppose," Reibe conceded. She began filtering through the photos. Many more were of Hasma. Still others were of children, undoubtedly Hasma's and Reibe's. One of the girls especially looked like Reibe.

 

"Funny thing about Hasma," Reibe said, pausing on a picture of Hasma and Reibe with three adult children and three others in the three to ten year old range. "He insisted that both the Vailar and the Raikellii family lines needed to continue. The daughters were Vailars and the sons were Raikelliis."

 

"Least he had a thing for family blood, I suppose," Strider said, shrugging. He felt a pang of regret for a lost love of his own, unfortunately for which he had no physical photo of, just his memories.

 

Reibe nodded. "He did that..." She scowled and set a large stack of photos aside, placing the ring box with them. "But then he had to go and die on me." She looked down at her fingers and wiggled them as if counting. "Thirty-nine hundred years ago..." Tears resurfaced. "... today."

 

"For what it's worth," he said. "I lost two people I also deeply loved...both within a short time period of one another. One died by the Sith..the other," he paused, holding back what must have been a tidal wave of emotion, one he was hiding to force himself to support Reibe, " the other was by my own hand. She sought to prove I was still the same Strider she knew and she succeeded...albeit just too late," he admitted.

 

The tears flowed more freely and Reibe drew closer, pulling Strider into an embrace. "We're both at two, then..." She smiled in spite of herself. "Suppose we're a bit more alike than I ever thought, Brother." With a weary sigh, she glanced into the box and asked, "Doesn't it make you want to never risk it again?"

 

Strider sighed, and looked at Reibe. "A part of me wishes I could change everything. But an even larger part of me would do it all over again just because it made me who I am today, and I don't regret that person in the least," Strider admitted, looking back at her. "Alike? In some ways, but i'll always contrast you. I compliment you, not match you," he said with a smile. He then looked back into the box and smiled shortly. "Now there's a face I recognize," he said.

 

Reibe also looked down at the next photo and nodded. The man's name was Jack, and both Reibe and Strider had known him well. "The master of jokes, that one..." She smiled. "Force, I miss him!" She toyed with the ring on her finger once more. "You know, I never could persuade myself he's gone for good, though..." She giggled. "You remember when he proposed?"

 

Strider chuckled. "Yes. Such tact."

 

Reibe laughed out loud. "Indeed. He always seemed to have the perfect sense of timing..." Jack had asked Reibe to marry him during someone else's wedding ceremony. Startled and embarrassed, Reibe had fled the scene, much to the bewilderment of the newlyweds and the amusement of her fellow Sith Hunters.

 

Strider nodded. "I remember laughing, one of the few times anyone had ever seen me show any significant emotion."

 

"I thought someone laughed," Reibe said thoughtfully. "I was pretty much out the door, though, so I wasn't sure."

 

She sighed and frowned. "My, the Force has an odd sense of timing... three-nine-ninety years since I married Hasma, three-nine-hundred years since his death... two-thousand years since I met Jack... six hundred years since he disappeared..." Her frown deepened. "All today.”

 

"Wouldn't that be rotten luck if I dropped dead right now?" Strider said with his usually ill-timed humor, smiling at Reibe. He folded his arms together. "I was freed from my own imprisonment at the death of one of my own cared ones. The Force has a unique way of deciding people's fates, but there is another idea that quite eludes me about it," he said in a much more serious tone.

 

Reibe glanced over at him. "And what is that idea?"

 

"We've been around for a ridiculously long time, Reibe. We've survived so much that we probably, looking back at it, shouldn't have. It makes you wonder if the Force really does work in mysterious ways, or if we've become, in a sense, a higher power than the Force, or perhaps we are now an embodiment that it has decided it will continue much of its work through, rather than make us become one with it," Strider pondered out loud, presenting a pretty serious point.

 

Frowning, Reibe pulled her long braid over her right shoulder and began twirling it thoughtfully. Finally, she asked, "Do you think then that all we've been through, including our lost love has been necessary to mold us into this... embodiment we have become?"

 

Strider could only shrug. "So it seems. I've always believed the Force encourages emotion, good and bad. Perhaps it meant for us to survive all of this, and that for some reason we are "chosen" by it," he theorized.

 

Reibe chuckled mirthlessly. "The Chosen Ones..." She wrinkled her nose. "I don't want to be 'chosen'... never worked out well for Anakin." Another thought struck her. "But Jack was like us... why wasn't he chosen?"

 

"He was chosen. He was chosen to be the one to bring you to where you are now," Strider said. "I don't like the idea, but that's what it seems. Sometimes that's just the way things are." He sighed and turned away from Reibe. They'd both been through so much, and finally they were reflecting on four thousand years of an intense lifestyle

 

Reibe bit her lip and looked down at her left hand. Carefully, she slipped the wedding ring off her left ring finger and set it lightly in the box. Then, she replaced the photos and snapped it shut. She took in a deep breath, and closed her eyes, releasing the breath slowly.

 

"Then let honor the sacrifices of our lost ones by being the best we can be," she said, opening her eyes to reveal a look of almost grim determination. She looked around the apartment and added, "Starting with clearing this place out. Come on, Strider, we have work to do."

 

And he could tell that the work she spoke of wasn't in reference to the apartment.

[Rev7]

Very good job Writer!

[Ztalker]

Love between a prisoner and a guard. An original thought! Also love the Anakin references at the end. Makes the story more...complete.

 

Good job and keep it up!

[Bee Hoon]

Hrm, the Sith aren't really into love:/ That was my first thought, and while the language is generally quite smooth, I feel that the story was not as... personal as it might have been. The people whom Reibe has loved and lost are hardly more than names in this story, and as a reader, I have no backstory for them, no idea why they could be loved, how they changed her life. I love the idea of this nostalgic look at keepsakes, but I think a different approach would help tremendously!