Song Sung Blue

[Clea Darkrunner]

<center><i>
Song sung blue.......
Everybody knows one.

Song sung blue.......
Every garden grows one.
</i></center>

She'd been quiet, almost sad on the trip out to their first big gig.

The Band was worried. She was their songbird, their moneyticket, their Frontman who had attracted the Recording Company's attention in the first place. Even more, she was their friend, the little sister whom the big men instinctively protected. She was their luck.

<i>Simon</i> was worried. The Faleen lead guitarman could SMELL her sorrow. She had sneaked off - the week they were all settling things, preparing to leave Coruscant-Under for good on the newly minted contract. She had sneaked off, and returned smelling strongly of the Lowest Levels. For a while he'd wondered if she'd taken up her old Profession. Finding the silver cylinder she had disassembled had changed that tentative idea.

Maybe she'd gone on her quietly-stated confrontation with the Jedi? He thought that for two days, until word of Jedi treachery had filtered down to the lower levels.

She'd probably had to kill one, he finally decided. Everyone knew how untrustworthy the Jedi were.

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<small>"Song Sung Blue" - Copyright Neal Diamond</small>

[Clea Darkrunner]

<center><i>Me and you

are subject to

the blues now and then

</i></center>

Clea shook her head, and bent over the datapad, composing.

Going to confront the Jedi hadn't helped. It had given her a name - Kallea - and a lightsaber that she could not consciously remember how to use. It had told her she <i>was</i> a Jedi, at a time when Jedi were being hunted, rewards offered for their dead bodies.

It had placed her in peril, leading a band of rescued Jedi through Coruscant-Under until she had lost them all in a storm-surge in the sewage line, falling finally to the Hidden Sea.

<i>Lost</i>.............

There was an idea for a song...........

She had lost her memory. The Jedi had lost their lives. The Galaxy had lost the Jedi. Stiff-necked and self-righteous though they were, Clea thought they'd be missed, sooner or later.

<i>Lost</i>.............

Lost.....something. Her scriber flew faster, and faster, noting words, sketching chords. <i>Lost..............Voices.................</i> Voices that could no longer be heared. Voices lost, due to forgetting, due to misplacing, due to.........death.

Her scriber stopped, and she looked up, staring with unseeing eyes as it dropped from her hand. Eyes that only saw a flashback of slaughter, of small drowned, blasted, and beheaded children.

The datapad slammed down as she ran for the fresher, barely making it in time. In the main part of the cabin, Sim looked at Simon, an unaccustomed look of worry on his face. "What's with Clea?" he rumbled. "She alright?"

"I don't know," said the Fallanaasi, getting to his feet, "but I think I'd better find out."

He walked into the 'fresher, a sly smile masking his worry. "Hey, Clea! You been doin' someone and got 'caught'?" he said jokingly.

The face she raised to him was unexpectedly grim. "You don't want to know, Simon."

"Yes, I do. I'm a friend," he said quietly.

Wiping her mouth, she sat back and regarded him for a long time. Something in her unsteady guts said, <i>Yes, you can trust him</i>, so she sat back and told him the story of her trip to the Jedi Temple.

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<small>"Song Sung Blue" - Copyright Neal Diamond</small>