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Sherlock's oldest and most vivid memory is of the Code.

He was still a youngling, maybe four or five, and he'd just started studying with the other children in his age group. A white-haired human woman had been instructing them in the first class of the day, lecturing about Jedi principles. He remembers that she spoke Basic with a light Coruscanti accent, and that the robes she'd been wearing were brand new, and that the lightsaber she carried hadn't been used in years. The lecture itself was of little to no consequence - all basic knowledge he'd picked up on his own, for the most part - and it wasn't as though he'd never heard the Code recited before, or even recited it himself.

But there is something about this memory. It's clear and sharp and precise in the way that so few memories are. It's the first time he can remember really seeing the way he sees now, as if all the little details knitted into the fabric of the world have jumped out at him at once, clamoring to make themselves known. He remembers sitting cross-legged on the (cold, stone, approximately four hundred years old) floor, and looking at his instructor (Soresu practitioner, two former padawans, one lost to the war), and obeying, out of habit, when asked to repeat the Code.

---

When John joins the army, the Republic has already been at war for nineteen years. He can tell that his mother thinks he's insane, but she doesn't try to talk him out of it. Instead, she just sighs - this sad, resigned little sound - and makes him promise to be careful. John tries not to notice the tears she's blinking back as he leaves her little flat, but the walls are old and thin, and he can hear her quiet sob over the soft shhh of the plasteel door sliding shut.

Harry tries to shout him out of it, then throws a datapad at his head and goes to drown her anger in some dicey cantina. He gets a call from the bartender three hours later, and ends up having to go down to said dicey cantina and break up Harry's latest drunken brawl, pulling his cursing sister out from between two Rodians shouting tinnily in Huttese. She cries all over his shoulder in the cab home, wet and messy and genuinely sorry for once.

John just pulls her in tighter and doesn't say anything.

---

Sherlock completes the Trials at nineteen. He's not the youngest person to ever pass them, but he's still young, and it gets him noticed. There's a war on, after all, and the Council needs bright, talented new Jedi to replace the ones the Sith are killing in increasingly large numbers. The war is over a decade old already, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

He takes the assignments he's given, more out of boredom than patriotic duty or loyalty to the Order. Sherlock feels as there is nothing new to see in the Temple. Its inhabitants and rituals are familiar, ingrained in him so deeply as to make any attempts at deduction nothing more than pedestrian distractions. Life in the Order is stagnant. He needs something more.

Sadly, war as a whole proves to be boring in a different way. It is not factual or logical, is inefficient and full of unnecessary violence, is wrong the same way he privately thinks the Code is wrong. For example, emotion exists - it is tangible, quantifiable, and denial does not make its power any less significant, nor affect its potential for disruption and destruction. Ignorance is tiresome and boring and astoundingly common, particularly among Jedi, no matter how much they think themselves above it. Passion is dangerous; ludicrous even, to the well-organized mind, but still objectively real.

Of course, the Code may be interpreted as metaphorical, or aspirational. But that does not make it any less wrong.

War is an expression of the same sort of logical fallacy. The shortest route from point A to point B can, on occasion, necessitate physical violence. In this case, however, the stated goals of the Sith could be achieved with far less widespread chaos, far fewer unnecessary battles, and in a staggeringly shorter time frame. He's even worked it out, if any of them want to bother asking. A handful of strategic assassinations and carefully placed agents could have established Sith dominance in the galaxy ages ago.

Then again, the Sith are not particularly interested in logic.

This is, in Sherlock's opinion, their single greatest flaw.

---

Three months after he ships out, John is freezing his arse off in a bunker on some god-forsaken lump of ice called Hoth and wondering why he ever thought this was a good idea. His hands are almost always shaking with the cold, and he hasn't eaten anything hot in weeks. There are maybe thirty-five Republic troopers and two Jedi in this middle-of-nowhere outpost, and they seem to spend most of their time acting as a waystation for the SIS and hoping against hope that the Sith don't know they're here.

Hope runs out at the four-month mark. The Sith descend quickly and without mercy, raining grenades and blaster fire down on the bunker as John's unit scrambles to mount a defense. They have the advantage of Jedi, at least - the attacking squadron may be larger by half, but they do not have lightsabers.

John waits to be afraid, and it doesn't come. His hands shake, and his heart races, and he trips over his own feet as the sounds of battle get louder, reality nothing at all like the training holovids they'd watched in basic. But he's not afraid. It feels more like something has been slotted into place. He picks up his medkit and his blaster and does what he's been trained to do.

Hoth's terrible cold seeps into his mind and his bones, this time stilling his hands instead of making them shake, and John thinks oh, that's why.

He listens to the chorus of blaster fire, and waits for the next dying soldier.

--

The mission to Corellia is Sherlock's eighth real assignment. He's twenty years old, only a year past the trials, and frankly quite unprepared for the reality of a full Sith contingent waiting to ambush them on the landing pad.

Their squad is tiny - only two Jedi, Sherlock included, and a eight-man squad of Republic troops. This is, at least in name, a "diplomatic" mission, nothing more than the guarded transport of supplies to Corellia's embattled security forces. Master Varak, the first man off the shuttle, is killed almost instantly. He obviously wasn't expecting an ambush, or at least not one with such an obvious power disparity. Sherlock counts at least ten enemy troopers and three Sith.

The leader of the enemy squad is a pale, hulking mass of a man, with bloodshot eyes and enough cybernetic implants to run a small power plant. He pulls Varak straight towards him, dragging the off-guard man down and across the landing pad in a staggering display of Force power. Sherlock only just manages to resist it himself - the split-second of warning is enough to root himself to the spot.

The older Jedi is not so lucky. As soon as his body makes it across the landing pad, he's impaled on the thrumming red blade of a lightsaber, gasping with surprise and horror as the Sith holding it grins madly.

The Republic troops, to their credit, act fairly quickly as soon as Varak is killed. There's definitely blaster fire, and shouting, and at least one trooper yelling at him to get down, sir.

But Sherlock doesn't really remember that, because what he remembers is this - his lightsaber, switched on almost of its own accord, a warm blue hum of power in his right hand. His senses, always an asset in battle, revealing to him the most efficient plan of attack (leftmost opponent is most vulnerable; prior battle injuries not completely healed, emotional attachment to third trooper from the right). His Force-assisted leap towards the closest Sith, whom he managed to dispatch with little effort. His brief clash with a second opponent, a vicious-looking woman with gnarled facial scars and a double-bladed lightsaber. His appreciation, distant but present, for the capable Republic troopers who appeared to be making short work of the Sith foot soldiers.

Then he remembers hitting the ground, back slamming into the cold metal of the landing pad, and looking up into the face of the Sith who'd killed Varak. The man's eyes are absolutely mad, a dull glowing yellow that smacks of insanity, and his face is spattered with blood. He's looking at Sherlock as though he's an insect to be crushed.

In that instant Sherlock knows how and when he's going to die, and it's pointless and terrible and he won't be killed by this cretin, this mindless little slave to bloodlust and passion. The anger surges up and out of him unbidden, and it's like an explosion, knocking the Sith back off his feet with a shout of surprise and pain.

He remembers standing, slower than he usually would. He remembers closing a fist of power, all-consuming and invisible, around the man's throat.

He remembers watching - cold, distant, as if through a glass window - as the life bled out of the Sith's yellow eyes, and as his body dropped, as a puppet with its strings cut, to the ground.

He remembers feeling free, blood surging in his veins and somehow more connected to the Force than he'd ever been before.

Then he realizes that he can't see. There are still enemy troopers firing on what's left of the Republic squad, and he is frozen to the spot, cloaked in more than enough anger and power to wipe them all from existence, but he cannot observe, cannot formulate a plan. All he can do is rush the line, lightsaber flashing and this angry, unknown part of the Force wrapped around him like armor.

There is a hush, afterwards, when he stands surrounded by the field of dead Sith and soldiers, and it is not just because of the shock of the attack, or Varak's unexpected death, or the two Republic soldiers he knows are dying behind him. A dozen wary eyes are on him, and his chest is heaving, pushing out wrecked and shallow breaths as he tries to see again.

When the mission is over and he comes back to Coruscant, robes stained with blood and mind still swimming with power, Sherlock searches.

He wheedles his way into the holocron chambers in the library, reads everything he can on the dark side, on the Sith Code and the Jedi Code, on the link between the Force and perception. Nothing makes sense, least of all the advice parroted to him by various Masters and teachers. He asks a lot of questions and makes a lot of people very uncomfortable; worried, wary, maybe even scared. The Temple seems colder than it ever has before.

The sense of stagnation he'd felt before becomes overpowering, omnipresent, and he wants to rage and scream, but then he remembers the landing pad, and the haze of anger, freeing and terrible and blinding all at the same time, and he forces himself to observe instead, deconstructing the nearest person or thing down to its molecules.

Finally, he hacks into the Order's personnel files - into his file, into the things he isn't supposed to know, like where he came from and when and whether he has any family. It's never really interested him before, but all of a sudden, it seems important, like a vitally important piece of data, something that will make the swirling mess in his brain settle back into logic and order.

He finds the name Mycroft Holmes. There's no age or address or any kind of identifying information at all, just a name.

It's not as though that sort of thing has ever stopped him before.

---

John doesn't stay on Hoth. The war is a vast, sprawling conflict, and everyone needs a doctor. He goes to Ord Mantell and Corellia, to Ryloth and Naboo, to the farthest and strangest bits of the Outer Rim. He sees worlds he's never even heard of before - sweltering hot planets made entirely of desert, worlds that are nothing but ocean from pole to pole. He sees small worlds and huge worlds, odd ones and boring ones, great ones and terrible ones.

The very last one is Dantooine.

He's got a bad feeling about the whole damn planet from the second they touch down, really. It clearly was a beautiful place, before the war - lots of sprawling grasslands and rivers, very picturesque. It's perhaps the farthest thing from Coruscant that he's seen thus far.

The war, though, has not been kind to Dantooine. There are more charred wastelands than real grasslands now, and the rivers are thick with blood and industrial runoff. The fucking kath hounds are everywhere, and they're mean little buggers. He treats just as many bites as he does laser burns in the months that his unit is stationed there, slogging through the ruined landscape.

If possible, the Sith are even thicker on the ground than the kath hounds. The squadron can't seem to make it a hundred yards without tripping over another contingent of them. Really, it's almost getting comical at this point.

It's just another day, another stolen moment between firefights, and he's hanging back at the end of the column, keeping an eye on the injured men marching there - and then there's a shout. One of the Jedi with the unit is shouting, pushing her way through the column and towards John. Her hand is at her waist, reaching for her lightsaber, which is odd-

-and then there's pain, and the harsh pinging sound that he knows as a lightsaber deflecting blaster bolts, and he's on his knees on the ground. He's not the only one. One of his patients, a man with a healing stomach wound, is face-down in the mud next to John. He can tell, even through the haze of pain and shock, that the other man isn't breathing.

There are hands on his shoulders, pulling him up and back, through the column and behind the line of soldiers forming up.

The world goes dark.

---

Mycroft helps him more than Sherlock will ever admit - to him or anyone else. Mycroft, it seems, has always known he had a brother, and Sherlock's general disinterest in sibling camaraderie does little to impact either Mycroft's ability or desire to assist him. It's Mycroft who manages to make his exit from the Order as painless and quiet as possible. Not that, by that point, many people are sad to see him go. There are token protests, more out of respect for tradition than anything else, but when people whisper Sherlock Holmes now they mean it as a curse, a warning.

Sherlock doesn't like accepting help from Mycroft, but it's not as though there's much else he can do, even if any civilian profession interested him in the least. The Holmes family is well-connected and wealthy, and his brother is overprotective and a just little bit indulgent. But he is bored, more bored than ever was in the Order. It's almost enough to make him want to go back.

Almost. He's not sure they'd want him back, anyways.

Spice is a nice distraction, a good antidote for boredom. It doesn't cloud his mind, the way the dark side does - did. If possible, it makes his senses even sharper, casts the world in brilliant colors, makes the connections he's always been able to see impossibly bright and beautiful, shining webs of cause and effect that everyone else is just too dim and uninspired to see. Mycroft disapproves, often and vocally. Sherlock just gets better at hiding his stashes, at concealing the shaking that comes from the highs.

(At night he dreams about power, about how it felt to close that fist and watch yellow eyes dim into lifelessness, and he wakes up shaking, a worse sort of shivering than anything produced by a spice high).

The years slip away, like water through a sieve. Time is nearly meaningless, between the spice and the endless distractions provided by the vast city-planet that is Coruscant. He learns, observes, deduces. He conducts experiments, learns new things, tests old theories - all the things he'd never been able to do in the Order. Crime is particularly fascinating - almost more interesting than spice, though of course it is more interesting with spice. These are problems he can solve, puzzles he can work through using facts and logic and observation, without the lightsaber that's gathering dust in a drawer. There is enough crime on this planet to keep him occupied for centuries, and it seems as though this might be it, might be the thing that settles his mind.

It isn't until he winds up in a jail cell, shivering violently in the throes of withdrawal, that he realizes there's anything wrong.

He's familiar with the officer who arrested him, the one who's standing across from him now, examining him warily through the plasteel bars. His name's Lestrade. He's a relatively young man, though older than Sherlock, human and grey-haired - (premature; possibly-no, definitely- brought on by stress, recently passed over for promotion, currently arguing with his wife). He's one of the few who's listened to Sherlock, on the occasion that he deigns to share valuable information with Coruscant Security. Sherlock really isn't sure why he's here now.

"What do you want?" he bites out, harsh and angry, his voice shaking with it.

"I want to know why you're doing this to yourself." Lestrade says, and he really does want that - Sherlock can tell. "You're smart. Brilliant, really. Put half my department to shame on the regular." He shakes his head, and the look on his face makes Sherlock feel all of seven years old again, being scolded by his elders for making the other younglings cry with his absolutely obvious deductions. "So why am I picking you up for possession in some dingy back alley, off your head on spice?"

Sherlock manages a scoff, in between a particularly violent shudder and a cough. "I hardly see how that's any of your business, Lestrade." He puts as much venom in his voice as he can manage. This is a pointless conversation with a pointless man and he just wants to go home. There are two separate experiments waiting for him there which will require immediate attention.

"You tossed me through a window, Sherlock."

The words are like ice sliding down his spine, even though there's no real hostility in Lestrade's voice - not even a lot of judgement, really. It's not that Sherlock has any particular moral qualms regarding pitching people through windows. He's done it before, in the rare event that such action was necessary.

It's that he doesn't remember doing it.

It's the landing pad all over again. That night, he throws out all the spice he can find.

---

"Dantooine or Ord Mantell?"

The question startles him. "Excuse me?"

John has been home for three months now. His dreams are full of blaster fire and his hands are always shaky. It makes him feel like a green kid, like he's back on Hoth in the bone-chilling cold, clutching his DL-44 and praying that the Sith don't find them.

The leg, though, is the worst part. He knows that his therapist thinks it's psychosomatic, but it doesn't fucking feel psychosomatic, and he sort of wants to strangle her with her own lekku every time he tells her that no, it's not any better, thank you very much. He doesn't even want to think about the suggestion of blogging quite yet. The HoloNet may never be ready for the adventures of John Watson, shut-in invalid extraordinaire.

He's only just got a real look at this man Mike has said is looking for a flatmate - tall, pale and rail-thin, curly dark hair - when he hears the question again, asked apropos of nothing in an even, calculating voice.

"Dantooine or Ord Mantell?"

It sounds just as jarring the second time. "Sorry, what?"

All John gets in response to that is an assessing look from the pale eyes behind the microscope. He can barely get a word in edgewise before he's been deconstructed piece by piece, taken apart and put back together by the man whose name is apparently Sherlock Holmes.

---

Hardly a day later and to his great chagrin, could be dangerous is all it takes to get John out the door, following a man he barely knows to a murder scene on a dusty old sub-level.

What he sees there, though, is nothing short of amazing, more amazing than what he'd seen in St. Bart's the day before, more than the bit with Harry's hand-me-down comlink in the cab on the way to the scene. Sherlock dissects the room with ease, picking it all apart as though it's a small animal pinned to a laboratory table, every organ pulled out and neatly labeled. John barely has enough time to say how brilliant that is before Sherlock's dashed off again, in a whirl of black coat and incomprehensible muttering.

Sergeant Donovan lets him out of the crime scene, eyes tracking over him suspiciously as he looks around for a way back to the skyway. "He's a freak, you know." Donovan's sneer bleeds into her voice. "A Jedi washout. Such a nutter that even the damn mystics didn't want him." There's a little less venom, but a little more smugness, when she continues. "One day, we'll all be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one who put it there."

John knows that's wrong. Well, he doesn't know, not really, but...he knows all the same. He's known Sherlock for less than a day altogether, but he can still tell this woman has him all wrong. But he doesn't want to say that out loud, because it has been less than a day, and it seems way to soon to trust someone this much - especially someone like Sherlock Holmes.

So John sets his jaw and turns away, limping and gripping his cane too hard as he makes for the skyway, trying to shake the feeling that he's in way over his head.

Being picked up by a mysterious woman in a sleek black hover car, complete with tinted windows, does very little to assuage his concerns.

---

Sherlock is carefully scanning the rush of cabs and speeders out on the skyway when John says "Is it all a Force thing, then? The...deduction?"

His eyes snap away from the view out the window and towards John, staring uncomfortably at him across the table. The other man clears his throat and continues. "I served with a lot of Jedi, you know, when I was in the army." His eyes are on Sherlock, curious, analyzing. "But I never met anyone who could do what you do. With them it was mostly healing, maybe a bit of...whatever you call it, sensing. Well, that and the tossing things about. Absolutely daft, that. Never could get used to it."

"No" is Sherlock's short, clipped answer. John just raises his eyebrows and holds his gaze. "By which I mean no, it is not all a...Force thing, as you so eloquently put it."

"It's just you, then."

"My connection to the Force helps, but I certainly wouldn't be incapable of deduction without it. I do not read minds, nor can I see the future." Sherlock doesn't bother checking the disdain he knows is in his voice. Foresight, even as practiced by the most capable Jedi, is hardly a reliable investigative tool. "Observation hardly requires Force sensitivity. Most people are just too dull to practice such a skill."

To his credit, John only looks mildly affronted. Clearly, he isn't bothered enough to stop talking, because several probing and irrelevant personal questions later, Sherlock finds it necessary to let John know that he considers himself married to his work.

Head things off at the pass, and all that.

John just makes an undignified noise and chokes on his drink. It gives Sherlock just enough time to notice the cab.

---

John shoots a murderous Sullustan cabbie through two windows and from over a hundred feet away, meets Sherlock's brother - Sherlock's brother, and that might have been the strangest part of this whole mad day - and then he and Sherlock go out to dinner.

He's got no idea what's become of his life, really.

They end up in some ridiculously cramped little diner on a dirty sub-level. The food is terrible, but John inhales it as though he's starving. Chasing after Sherlock is exhausting, and apparently hunger-inducing.

Sherlock just orders tea. He's sipping it idly, staring intently at a Nautolan couple arguing on the other side of the restaurant, when John says - through a mouthful of food, table manners be damned - "I didn't think Jedi had families."

Sherlock doesn't say I'm not a Jedi. He just says "They don't."

John takes another bite of his meal. "Never heard of anyone leaving before. Not someone with your level of skill, anyways."

Sherlock's answering smile is real, genuinely pleased, as though the way John has skipped through all of the intermediate questions - Were you really a Jedi? Why did you leave? When? How? - is the most wonderful thing in the world. "The Order was terribly dull." He takes a small, measured sip of tea. "And the robes were ghastly."

John can't help himself. He snorts, but it turns into a laugh, a proper laugh - and then Sherlock is laughing with him, the way they'd laughed not an hour before, right after John shot a man, and he's mad, and Sherlock is stark raving mad, but damn, he can't stop laughing.

John can't really bring himself to care. He's got a good feeling about this.