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Did the whole universe hate him?

There’s only one answer when the universe hates you, whispered the shadow worm from the base of his skull. Hate it back.

So he did.

It was easy.

He hated the universe. Hated everything about it: all the pointless suffering and empty death and all the stupid mindless mechanical useless laws and all the squirming blood-smeared ignorant life, hated the stony flesh under his feet and the air that he breathed, hated himself, hated even the hate he felt and suddenly he wasn’t tired anymore, he wasn’t confused anymore, everything was simple, everything was easy, everything made sense because hate was everything and everything was hate, and he didn’t want to die anymore.

All he wanted was to hurt someone.

He looked down at the screaming girl. He hated her.

She wasn’t even real. Like a dream. He could do whatever he wanted. Anything. His heart thundered, and his breath came short and hot.

Anything.

Power raged through him as though a dam had burst in his chest. He smiled, and stretched forth his hand, and made a fist.

The Force stifled her screams to a shocked choke. Through the Force he could feel her terror, feel the savage burning of digestive acids slowly dissolving her skin; in the Force he could feel power, real power, power enough to crack her skull like a pterosaur egg, power enough to—

Wait, begged his last shred of sanity. Wait—

He could feel her—in the Force?

“Oh—” he whispered. His knees buckled. “Oh, oh no, oh please no—”

His hatred and his strength failed together. He pitched forward, his boots losing purchase on the rim, and he tumbled down the inner curve of the bowl to splay bonelessly beside the stomach-mouth. He might have just lain there, just let himself pass out, let himself sleep until the mouth beside opened again to close around him, instead, but a hand, a girl’s hand, a real hand belonging to a real girl, clutched desperately at his robeskin, yanking him awake, and her shriek scorched his ears. “HELP me you have to HELP ME you have to help me—”

“Sorry,” Jacen mumbled, blinking rapidly, trying to make his eyes focus, struggling weakly to rise. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—”

His vision cleared, and he saw her, really saw her, for the first time. He saw that her hair had once been long and flowing and golden blond under its coating of greasy dirt; he saw that her eyes were blue, and her face a delicate oval; he saw that—

She’s barely even my age.

And if I don’t do something RIGHT NOW, she won’t get any older.

He couldn’t trust his legs to support him; he swung himself around to brace his feet against the crumple of stomach-lips, and took her wrist in both hands. He pulled hard, hard as he could, hard enough to make her begging turn to a yelp of pain—

“You’re breaking my ARM please you have to get up, you have to pull me UP—”

Get up? He didn’t have the strength to stand. He didn’t have the strength to save her. He had only strength enough to hurt her even more.

And to torture her final minutes with empty hope.

He could barely imagine what she must have gone through, to miss the evacuation of Coruscant, to survive the bombardment, and the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong. To have lived through the shattering transformation of her world into theirs: the tearing of a whole planet from its orbit. To have hidden in constant terror all these weeks and months in the downlevel shadows, desperately avoiding the conquerors. And when the cavern beast had led her down its throat …

Her heart must have been bursting with relief and joy. She had finally found sanctuary—

Then she had found that the only real sanctuary is death.

And how she would come to that death: eaten alive, digested while still awake and aware.

And when she had looked up to see him on the rim above her, an explosion of sudden hope—

Because she couldn’t know that the man who had come to her rescue was a broken ex-Jedi, tainted with darkness, half mad with suicidal despair.

How had he ended up so useless?

The simple unfairness of it made him angry.