Layla's Intergalactic Journey of Self-Discovery

She was going to die.

Her saber was out, but she could barely lift it, she could barely move. She bit back a scream as the hulking form of her attacker loomed over her like a storm cloud.

There was no escape. It was over.

The last thing Layla saw before blackness took her was the look on his face. The look of a boy who had always been told he was special, and that he needed to save people from the bad man who wore long robes and had a thick beard. His eyes were wide, his mouth open in the beginnings of a scream.

He looked... shocked, really. Like someone had just broken the news to him that he wasn't special at all, and that he was never going to be more than an ordinary man who lived an ordinary life in a boring planet in an ordinary star system ruled by a run-of-the-mill galaxy with no unique characteristics whatsoever and nothing special or notable about it and certainly nothing worth fighting for.

Layla couldn't blame him for looking like that. She knew how it felt to be disappointed by reality when you dreamt of something else as a child. She knew how it felt to cry yourself to sleep because you thought your life would be better if you were something else, someone else, somewhere else -- someone special who could do something no one else could do and live in a place no one else could ever go and see things no one else could ever imagine seeing and go places no one else could ever go except maybe her because she might have been able to go there too if only she'd done this or said that or acted this way and so forth and so on until suddenly you're an adult and you realize that life isn't *that* interesting after all; not nearly as interesting as you'd hoped it would be when you were younger.

The attacker stepped back. He straightened his collar, brushed off the dust from his shoulders. He turned around, headed down the corridor where Layla lay still clutching her bleeding stomach, desperately trying to hold herself together long enough for help to arrive.

She heard him pause at the end of the corridor, turn back around towards her still form on the floor. There was another moment's hesitation before he finally spoke: "I'm sorry," he said softly as he turned away once again and walked away down the hallway without looking back again. "I'm very sorry."