Sunday, July 13, 2008
Jedi Adept: A Path in the Dark Ch. 5
Jacen stood in the shadows, wrapping them tight around him as he watched the traffic slide past. With an intensity born of utter darkness, he stared at the foyer of an apartment building, waiting for someone to emerge; knowing that she would appear sooner or later.
Finally, his patience was rewarded, and he began to grin as Tahiri Veila stepped out of the doorway, her feet customarily bare. She was dressed in dingy clothes, worn and dirtied. Her hair was unkempt, and her cheeks sunken and shallow.
She appeared almost grey and lifeless, and he frowned at the stark change in the younger Jedi. He remembered her laughing and happy, even when she was covered in mud and ash from a Chiss fire-bomb.
He dispelled the shadows and walked closer towards her, falling into step behind her, yet keeping his Force presence pulled tight and close around him.
Suddenly she stopped, and without turning around, said, "What do you want, Jacen?"
He chuckled, and loosened his Force presence slightly, allowing a bit of amusement to leak out through his shields. "How did you know I was here?"
She laughed bitterly as she turned to face him. "I heard you. And… and you smell like Anakin. Now, what do you want?"
He grinned at her, knowing it made him look like his father, like his brother, and he noticed the way it seemed to cause her to recoil from him. "Can't I just want to see an old friend?"
She shook her head slightly. "You don't have any old friends anymore. We're all pieces on a game-board to you." She gave another of those harsh laughs. It sounded almost demented, and for a moment, Jacen wondered if he'd made the right decision. "It's not that unlike your uncle, actually."
He arched an eyebrow, and wondered, when did she get so bitter? As fast as that thought flickered across his mind, another raced after it; but I can use that.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Actually, I just wanted to give you a present; something that I have in my power to give now. That is if you want it…"
She shook her head, lowering her eyes to look towards her feet. Her voice was soft and filled with bitterness. "There's nothing you can give me that I want."
He watched as she turned away and began to walk again.
He allowed her to get a dozen paces away, before he replied. "I can give you Anakin's final kiss."
She stopped dead in her tracks; her body and Force presence suddenly taut and electric. He could taste the fire, the desire and the anger that radiated off of her. Grinning, he thought, I have her now.
Slowly, she turned towards him, and he wiped the grin from his face, resetting his expression into one of deadly seriousness. Ben used to call it his Jedi face.
With slow and deliberate steps, she made her way back to him. Her body seemed to shake from the barely suppressed anger, and it was all he could do to keep the glee from his face and Force presence.
"What do you mean by that?" she hissed out between clenched teeth.
"I meant exactly what I said," he replied, happy at the way she had responded to his bait. "I can give you the chance to give Anakin that final kiss." Then he drove the hook in deeper, ensnaring her firmly. "Don't you remember? It was the one that you denied him."
The fire of her emotions collapsed, replaced suddenly by a deep pain and regret, but Jacen knew that the anger was there, he could feel it, just beneath the surface, ready to spill over at any moment. An anger that was ready to burst into an inferno which would burn the Jedi to the ground.
Her shoulders slumped, and she nodded her head. "How?"
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, like they were old friends, or maybe family. Then he turned her in the direction of the Guard headquarters and began walking. "Come on, I'll explain on the way."
Her body hesitated against the pressure he was exerting for a moment; but just one.
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Luke Skywalker sat at his terminal, carefully wording the invitations to his wife's funeral.
He suppressed the dark pain that welled up within him every time he considered what had happened; every time he thought of her body, so cold and broken in death.
He had long thought that there was no one who could beat her in a fight, fair or not. Yet someone had. Someone had ripped through her defenses, and killed her. A simple poison.
Then after she was dead, whoever had killed her had desecrated her body. Used a lightsaber and carved away at her face and body, denying Luke even the small comfort of being able to see her whole one final time.
Finally satisfied with the wording, he looked over the guest list: all the Jedi, half a dozen politicians, twice that many smugglers, and then his broken, scattered family. He made a note that Leia was to be asked to speak at the funeral, and then signed off on the list, leaving it in a queue that R2-D2 monitored so that he could take care of finalizing the arrangements.
That chore finally done, he signed off the terminal and then stood up. He walked into the hallway, and looked down the hall towards the room that he had shared with her. For a moment, he almost walked that way to sleep in his bed.
Instead he turned towards the living room, deciding to sleep on the couch yet again.
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Chase opened his eyes. He found himself lying in a pile of refuse; his head tilted back looking up towards the sky. It seemed small and distant; a small patch of blue-grey so far above him, blocked out almost entirely by the towering buildings. He lifted his head up, and then twisted it side to side, looking to the left and the right. With a slight shock, he realized that he was deep in the underbelly of the city.
Glancing down, he saw the trash that coated the ground, piled up against the side of the building by the wind. He shifted, and the movement caused the pile to crumble around him. The movement must have disturbed something because he could suddenly smell the trash: rotting food, decomposing plastics and bio-materials. It stank.
He stank of it.
Grimacing at the stench, he leveraged himself up, and more of the trash skittered to the ground, the noise echoing back to him.
Freezing in position, he strained to hear, wondering if anything out there was coming. He had heard horror stories of the creatures that wandered the under-city. First were the dangerous predators brought to Coruscant as pets or zoological specimens, and then released into the undercity when they grew too large or were unable to be kept for whatever reason. Then there was all the vonglife that still wandered around down here, eking out a living among the foundations of the giant city-planet.
The final terrors that haunted the undercity were the mutants and the ferals. The former were once sapient beings, who had slowly devolved until they were nothing more than animals, living and acting entirely on instinct. The latter were the remaining slaves from the Yuuzhan Vong occupation, driven insane and dangerous from the pain of their coral slave seeds and the death of the World Brain.
Hearing nothing, he slid the rest of the way to the ground, and paused in a crouch, listening once more.
This was unfamiliar territory to him. He had never before ventured this far beneath this surface, this far away from the people, and the civilization of Coruscant proper. Down here the walls were dappled with mold, and pock marked by scratches from some unknown creature or other. The ground had puddles of sludge at irregular intervals, and a stream of slime-encrusted water ran down the middle of the walk way.
Crouched low, he crept forward, straining his ears to hear if anything was approaching him.
Satisfied, he straightened and looked around, wandering exactly where he was. He knew two things: he was near the Jedi Temple, as that was where he had been heading when he was cornered by the Guard, and that he was deep in the undercity, probably close to bedrock level. If not lower.
He crept forward, and then heard something; a whirling noise. Pausing, he turned around slowly to see a utility droid appear. It approached the first street lamp, and its top half shot into the air on a mechanical lift, stopping just beneath the lamp. A manipulator arm reached out unscrewed the bulb and placed it into a container, then reached into another container and screwed a new bulb in.
A light bulb that was as dead as the one that the droid had just removed.
Chase frowned at the scene, and watched as the droid repeated the process at the next street light. There was something disturbing in the ultimate futility of the process which the droid was going through. Something disturbing in the fact that for who knows how long, that droid had gone through this area, changing those lightbulbs, in a futile effort to stave off the decay that was evident all around him.
The droid had moved to the next light, and shot once more into the air. He frowned, watching the droid as it unscrewed the lamp.
An intense surge of empathy slashed through him. He understood futility and wanting to change something, but always ending up with the same results.
After watching the droid change a final light bulb, Chase turned away from it and started walking once more. Heading in the direction he thought the Jedi Temple should be in.
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Tahiri watched as Jacen's Star Destroyer, the Anakin Solo, loomed closer through the viewport of the shuttle. Its matte black hull glittered with a myriad of lights from its thousands of viewports. They drew ever closer, and son she was able to make out distinct markings, and the hangar bay which Jacen was aiming the shuttle craft towards.
She cast a quick glance at Jacen where he sat behind the controls, calmly piloting the craft.
She wondered for a moment if she liked the fact that there was a Star Destroyer named after Anakin. If having a warship named after him would have been the type of memorial that he would have wanted. She sighed, as she realized that it was not. That he would have thought it egotistical and absurd.
She looked over at Jacen again. "So tell me, just how am I going to get this kiss?"
Jacen's eyes sliced towards her for a moment, and something about them scared her. She looked closer, and realized that they were still the same brandy-colored eyes they had always been; just not quite as warm as they used to be.
"Have you talked to my Mother or uncle about me sending messages across time during the Killik Crisis?"
Startled, Tahiri shook her head. "I don't think I've heard anything about that."
Jacen grinned and pain lanced through her heart.
"I didn't think so," he replied. "It's a trick that I learned from the Aing-Ti called Flow-walking. What it means is that you are able to use the Force to push yourself up or down the flow of time, and able to view the past. See it, touch it, and conceivably even change it, though you risk temporal paradoxes that could wipe out existence doing that."
"Oh," she replied dumbly, staring at him. "Oh…Oh!"
Her eyes widened as realization of what he was saying slammed through her. Hope flared bright and fierce in her heart, and she leaned back in the co-pilot's seat staring up at the ceiling. She shook her head, her blond hair slicing side to side with the movement.
"But," she said, looking up at him, noticing the stillness he watched her with. It reminded her of a vua'sa right before it pounced on its prey. "We can't risk a temporal paradox by going and doing something like that."
Jacen shrugged his shoulders, and tossed her another grin. "That is true. How about this then, we just go look and see him."
Her brow knit together in a frown. "I, I guess that wouldn't hurt."
He smiled brightly, and though she could feel warmth at the surface of his Force presence. Despite the warmth he was showing, she couldn't help but shudder at his smile.
She looked out the viewport and noticed they were sliding through the magcon field, Jacen being guided towards his landing spot by the deck crew.
He glanced at her, before returning his attention back to landing. "Great. Let me pick a few things up, and then we'll head on out to Myrkr."
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