The cantina doors opened to a blast of noise. With the day shift just coming off duty, the room was starting to heat up. News from the front had been good, a Republic battle group sent limping its way Core-ward after being handed a serious beat-down by one of Revan's new pet admirals, and the men were taking the opportunity to get slobbering drunk. Jaq scanned the room for any faces he recognized. None. Good. The new guy, Hakk, was becoming a problem. He just enjoyed himself way too much, in the cantina and elsewhere. If he came in hung over one more time, Jaq just might give him a little additional training on some of the finer points of their trade.
The bartender, expecting him, set him up with juma unasked. Jaq left the glass, took the bottle, and walked out. His day had started out in the refresher and only gotten better from there, so he wasn't in the mood to listen to a bunch of grunts debating military strategy. Instead, he headed back down to the cell block.
In session the day before, his Jedi had gone into convulsions on the gurney hard enough to dislocate one wrist and fracture the other. Medical was backed up and wait-listed her, and today when he went to get a treatment ETA, they shined him on with some crap about unlikely to cause fatal outcome and hey, at least it made her real compliant in the cuffs. The capper of his day had been the loss of a padawan who had died of heart failure, cause as yet undetermined. Command had been very clear in their orders--turn, not terminate--and even though it hadn't been his interrogation, as senior operative on duty, he was going to be called to account. If he didn't want to spend the entire debriefing pinned to the ceiling by his throat, he'd better make sure nothing happened to that female Jedi.
Good call. Rounding the corner, he saw Hakk exit one of the cells and disappear into the stairwell. It was the Jedi's cell, of course.
He was lucky Jaq didn't shoot him right there. Turning Jedi went in stages, careful, deliberate stages. You didn't stretch it out and lose momentum and you sure as hell didn't escalate without a damn good reason. It had been going well, she was wearing down right on schedule. She'd stopped fighting them on the table, she screamed like an animal and moved like a machine, she was almost ready.
Then Hakk had to go and keck the whole thing up. Well, he'd be back at the front catching blaster bolts by the end of the week, Jaq would see to that. And if she was damaged, he'd send that dumb sack upstairs. There were probably a few newly turned Sith who would like nothing better than to practice their abilities on a former interrogator.
When he walked into the cell, she was naked and shivering in the far corner, holding her swollen wrists against her body. She had fresh bruises on her neck all around the neural restriction collar, probably from being choked with it, and around her lay strips of her former prison grays. He'd literally cut them piece by piece off her body. Fine. Upstairs it was. In fact, feed him to Command. Screw the autopsy, here was the new official cause of the padawan's death: the kid died because Hakk was too busy getting his jollies to notice his subject was seizing. Case closed. Enjoy the view from the ceiling, jackass.
Still, maybe he could use this to his advantage, move up the schedule, have a some progress to report. Hakk had opened a Good Guy option for him, so might as well work the angle.
"He's been at you, hasn't he?" It took the Jedi a moment to realize Jaq was speaking to her. Aside from whatever sweet nothings Hakk had been whispering in her ear, no one had said a word to her beyond the most curt of orders since she arrived. They talked about her, not to her. They did not look at her, they looked at what they did to her. She was not a person, she was a task. They hadn't even asked her any questions. What was the point, when the only thing Jaq wanted to know was if she was ready to turn?
Play it careful, not too sympathetic now, just a guy, just a soldier who'd let someone get past him on watch. "Sorry about that, it won't happen again."
Setting down the bottle and slipping off his jacket, he offered it too her. She stared at it, not at him, and did not move or speak. He sighed, threw his jacket on the floor, squatted down next to her and had a good long look at her for the first time since she arrived.
She was small, with a build that would have been considered sturdy up until a few weeks ago, brown skin grown a dry, dusty gray, and hair that was blue-black, thick and wavy until they had shaved it off. Her eyes were black, rimmed in red, surrounded by sunken, gray circles. The wrists were bad. How bad did they have to get before the damn med techs got off their asses? Jaq didn't intend to find out. Tomorrow morning one of them was going to be working on her or he was going to be working on one of them. If Command found their new convert's hands had been crippled beyond the use of a lightsaber, he'd probably lose the use of his own.
"Here, give me your hands." She tried to scramble backwards, quailing deeper into the corner. "I'm not going to hurt you, I'm just going to check your wrists. Really." He reached out to take one of her hands, and she either believed him or was too terrified even to flinch away. The one wrist was swelling darkly purple-green and needed to be set yesterday, the other was pretty badly dislocated but not worse than he'd treated himself in the field. "I'm going to fix this. It's going to hurt, but just for a second, OK?" Those words in his mouth. Ah, the metallic tang of irony.
Taking her forearm in one hand and her hand in the other, he pulled, then twisted just a little. She let out a little grunt of pain. There, the click of the bone settling back into place. "Can you move it?"
She cautiously flexed her hand. It worked. She cradled her broken wrist in the opposite arm and returned to staring at the floor, while he spread his jacket over her and tucked it behind her shoulders. "I won't be able to get you another set of grays until tomorrow," he explained. "You can keep it 'til then. I'll also have medical come down and see about getting you fixed up." He should have them run a feed tube down her throat while they were at it. Papery skin, cracked hands and lips, crusty eyes, she was obviously badly dehydrated. It happened sometimes, after a few too many rides on the board. They stopped drinking, because a mouthful of water was a mouth full of water, and they couldn't stand it anymore.
He held out the juma bottle. "Want something to drink?" She shook her head. "Some water, maybe?" and he could see the movement of her throat against the collar as she swallowed her choke response. Oh, yeah, definitely tube her. He should probably have the medical guys give her a pelvic as well. No telling what she might have caught if Hakk had gotten in her, and if one or two of the med techs weren't much better than Hakk when it came to getting their jollies from inappropriate sources, well, Jaq would look all the shinier after handing out some disciplinary hurt on her behalf.
"Suit yourself," he said and settled himself against the opposite wall. "The name's Rand, by the way."
He sat for a few minutes, watching the door and sipping at his juma. Damn, he was tired, and now he was basically going to have to work a double-shift to recover this mess. He really hoped Command ripped Hakk a new hole. They probably would, too. Or cut him one, with a lightsaber. And dragging her around by the restraint collar! That was just stupid! What if it had come off somehow? It was the only thing between them and her Force abilities. Even if she didn't kill Hakk herself, if she'd gotten loose, some Dark Lord would have probably reached all the way down his throat, grabbed him by the asshole, and turned him inside-out like a sock. That was something Jaq never, ever wanted to see again.
"I don't think he's coming back," he said finally. "You're probably fine now, if you want to get some sleep." But he made no move to leave and she would not sleep while he was there.
"He's not a Sith, you know," he said, "he's just a two-meter stack of crap in a uniform. A real Sith wouldn't have done that. The Sith have more self-control." He looked at her. "Kinda like the Jedi, which makes sense, since they are Jedi, for the most part. The higher-ups, anyway." She looked at him out of those dark, hollowed-out eyes. "I mean, they really are the same--same skills, same discipline, right?" He took another pull at the bottle. She wasn't rising to the bait, and honestly, he didn't expect her to.
"I never could figure them out, though, the Jedi," he said speculatively, as though they were sitting in the cantina, bitching about Command and chewing over the war. "With the Sith, every order I received, I understood it. A lot of them I didn't like, most of them I didn't like, some of them I even disagreed with. Didn't say so, of course. But!--" he raised the bottle for emphasis, "I always understood why. I always got the point. But the Jedi... Who the hell knows why they do anything. Sure, they've always got some story, blah blah blah, but in the end, only the Jedi really know, and really, I'm not sure even they do most of the time."
Stretching out his legs, he settled himself against the wall. Might at well get comfortable, it was gonna be a while.
"I used to know this guy," he continued, "who hated Jedi. Hated them. And this was way back before the war, before the Mandos, so it wasn't anything like that. He just hated them all on his own. So, finally, I asked him why. Turns out that the Jedi had taken his little sister for training when he was about 10. OK, so why is that bad? Well, they were this dead-broke mining family in this dead-broke mining colony on this ice-moon out at the ass-end of the Republic, and this Jedi just shows up out of black space and says he wants to take their daughter and train her to be a Jedi at the academy on, I dunno, Dantooine? Dantooine, I think it was. And the family was all excited, their little girl was going to get out of that hole in the moon and be a Jedi! And they were all planning the trip, trying to figure out who they could borrow the money from so they could book passage to Dantooine, and then the Jedi says, nope, sorry, no family, she would go with him and that'd be the last they saw of her. So then they think, oh, well, they couldn't afford the trip anyway, but they'd send her lots of letters and presents and—wait! Nope, again! Contact with the family is discouraged. Pft. Yeah. Discouraged. Never got a letter back from her, never knew if she got anything they sent. Just...nothing."
"Now, really," he turned to the Jedi as though for explanation, "what the hell kinda choice was that?! You just send your kid away and never see her again, or you condemn her to a life at the bottom of a mineshaft and just space any potential future she might have had? Right, so they did what most parents do, they sent her away, even though she didn't want to go. The guy said the Jedi practically had to drag her screaming onto the ship, and afterwards, he said his mom cried every night for six months. Kept her toys on the bed, kept her clothes in the closet for over a year. It was like the kid had died, or been taken by slavers. And, that girl, she musta felt like she'd been sold off, like she'd been orphaned. Dragging a crying kid away from her family forever and we're supposed to believe these are the good guys? Sure, easy for them to justify—they got no kids! They got no family! They got no idea what they are doing to these people. Or they just don't care. Or both."
The Jedi had tucked in her feet and drawn her knees up under his jacket so he could only only see the upper part of her face over the edge of the collar. But she was listening, really listening, and she believed him, he could feel it, which was good, because it was nothing but the truth. Truth had always been his best weapon against the Jedi.
"And then, then, oh, this is the real kick in the head," Jaq flashed her a bitter smile, "it turns out that most of the kids they take for training never get to be Jedi! The Jedi Masters--'masters,' it really does begin to sound like slaving if you listen, doesn't it—the Masters pick their padawans to train to be Jedi, and the rest of them wash out of the program. That miner family, that little girl, all that screaming and crying, that Jedi and the brilliant future he told them she had, maybe that all just went right out the airlock. Who knows where she ended up? Maybe she is a Jedi. I guess it's possible. Maybe she joined the army. Maybe she's floating around Malachor with the rest of 'em." Pointing upwards, toward the ceiling, toward all the levels of the base stacked on top of them, he added, "Maybe she's upstairs right now getting the training she traded her family for, and the Jedi never gave it to her."
"Aaaaaanyway," he sighed, turning his attention back to the juma bottle, "I tried figuring it every now and then, that code of theirs. 'There is no emotion, there is peace.' What does that even mean? Seriously, the Jedi Code, right of the gate and no one knows what they're talking about, what they're doing or why. 'There is no emotion...' How is that possible? How is that even human? What the hell kind of peace is that? I dunno. I don't know how the Jedi justify what they do, and lucky for me, I don't have to."
Closing his eyes, he let the room fall silent and just...listened to her for a bit. Rough breathing, a lot of it probably her throat swelling a little after having been choked and dragged around by the collar, a lot of it from the dehydration, maybe some residual fluid in the lungs. But also, she just hurt. Everywhere. He could feel it rolling off her, floating across the floor like a cold draft. Good. Let her hurt. She should hurt. They should all hurt, every last manipulative, righteous, lying one of them. They'd been playing pazaak with a loaded deck for a long time now, but the dealer always found out eventually, and Revan was one hell of a dealer. Too bad for them, but they were way overdue for a trip the back room for what the Exchange thugs liked to call a "Nar Shaddaa massage."
"I wonder where that guy is now, if he's even alive. I knew him back on Kavoraan, but he doesn't live there any more. No one lives on Kavoraan any more." He could hear her heart, slow, steady. Good. However bad off she was, she wasn't going to be joining that padawan any time soon, but it meant more than that. It meant she wasn't afraid of him, and that was good, too. She needed to be afraid-- hopeless and pissing terrified--of everything else, everything, but not him. He was the good guy, he was going to save her, give her clothes, give her food, give her attention and a warm voice in a cold cell. He was going to be her protector. He was going to make her human again. And then he was going to make her a Sith.
"You ever been to Kavoraan?" he asked. "No? Not surprised. It's out on the outer rim of the Outer Rim, mostly a fuel refinery for an asteroid mining operation and a space port for some nearby agricultural colonies. You only go there if you're a freighter pilot or a farmer or someone looking to have a good time and make a few credits without the law on your back. Kind of like a little Nar Shaddaa, if Nar Shaddaa wasn't, y'know, a complete shithole."
The juma bottle was getting kinda light, he'd better slow down. He had been planning on drinking it to get to sleep, not to get chummy with the Jedi. "I miss it, though. I may be one of the last people who knows it was ever there, but it was a great little port, back in the day." He raised the bottle in a toast and drank to Kavoraan, then drank again, because that's the kind of city it had been. Idly peeling at the label on the bottle, he wondered if maybe he should wrap it up and head back to his bunk. Or go find Hakk and kick him around the room for a couple hours, just to get a jump on the next day.
But her face, her expression, it was a little soft, a little drowsy, like a kid being told a bedtime story. No, he wasn't going anywhere, if she was listening to him like that. The cell wasn't exactly comfortable, heat-wise, and the jacket was warm. She wasn't shivering for the first time, probably, since she'd gotten there. Jaq made another mental note to turn down the temperature in the cell a notch when he left and then bring it back up when he returned. Her world was going to be a colder place when he wasn't in it.
He had another thought. Instead of coming back to get the jacket, he'd send someone else, Geeter maybe. Geeter would be perfect, that psychotic Rodian twitch. Jaq would have him come in and demand she tell him who gave her the jacket. It's true that prisoners weren't supposed to have access to anything other than their grays, to keep them from cobbling together some sort of disguise. Of course, this was technique, not a violation of regulations, but she wouldn't know that. Yeah, have Geeter come in and try and get her to give him up. Win-win. If she protected him, if she took his side, he had her. If she gave him up, he'd have Geeter take her interrogation schedule for a few days, maybe a week, then come back with a few applied stunner-burns where she could see them, maybe a black eye, and a story about how Command had busted him over the jacket, and he'd have her anyway. Jedi hated to see people suffer. Individual people anyway. Large numbers, cities, planets—they seemed fine with those.
So he'd stay and keep her company for a while. "I remember the first time I ever landed there, on Kavoraan, I remember thinking, 'These guys have got to be the loudest people in the whole freakin' quadrant.' And I don't mean their voices, though, yeah, they were loud, why say something when you can yell it across the whole damn cantina, right? But just--" he made vague circles in the air with one hand while he lifted the bottle to his lips with the other, "--everything! There was always something going down, somebody getting caught at something, cheating cards, screwing around with someone's wife, somebody deciding something was an insult even when it wasn't. Especially when it wasn't. Man, I had some of the best barfights there. Just...huge, tables smashed, chairs flying, people flying, just crazy, huge fights. And then a couple days later everybody's laughing about it, but now the way they're telling it, there's twice as many smashed tables, twice as many flying chairs, and that guy that got thrown through the window was thrown by them, or that guy was them, and...y'know? Crazy. Maniacs, every last one of them." He raised the bottle again and drank to Kavoraan craziness.
"It's not like they were dangerous or anything. Yeah, you had about a fifty/fifty chance of them either buying you a drink or taking a swing at you, but for a gambler, those are pretty good odds... Oh! Now, there was one real, serious problem with the place—no pazaak! How is does that happen?! Everyone gambles and nobody plays pazaak? They had this other game, what was it called, um, te...teksis? That's right. Teksis. Never did get the hang of that game. The rules were just...there were too many of them, and I don't know how anyone can drink and keep them straight. Who knows, maybe they can't, that's why there were so many fights."
The floor around him was covered with little scraps of label and the juma bottle was empty. Damn, that would have been a good night's sleep. That and a little company to keep him warm would have been perfect. Plus, he was starting to get a weird headache. Not the hammer to the skull kind he normally got, this was more of a slight but growing pressure on his brain. It hurt less than the hammer but it was harder to ignore. He should put in for some R&R, but they wouldn't give it to him. The curse of being too good at your job.
"Yeah," he sighed again. "I sure do miss that place. The bartenders didn't water down the drinks that much, the dealers didn't step on your spice too bad, and the ladies were real friendly. Reeeeaal friendly. Though to be fair," he added with a twitch of his eyebrow, "the guys were pretty damn friendly, too. But in the end, there just wasn't enough to do there. So I left." He upended the juma bottle—not completely empty after all, it turned out—and poured a thin puddle onto the floor. No booze in the cells either, another broken reg. Geeter was going to enjoy this one.
"I did go back, though, just one more time. I was in the army and the Mandalorians were eating the Rim alive. We were all waiting for the Jedi Council to make a move, wondering whether it was going to have to rain Basilisks on Coruscant before they'd pull their lightsabers out of their asses and help us, when we get orders to go to Kavoraan. Seems that the Mandalorians like blowing up fuel refineries and depots, they go boom real good, and we were supposed to go and evac any survivors. Everyone was pissing and moaning about the ship being too crowded already, but I was thinking, hey, I haven't had a good laugh, good brawl, or a good lay in a long time. I figured with a ship full of Kavs, I was bound to get at least one of those, y'know?
"Well, I don't know who thought there were any survivors to evacuate. The Mandos must have used it for orbital saturation bombing practice or something, because the whole place—the whole place, from one horizon to the other—was as flat as this floor." He stamped on the metal decking for emphasis. "About the same color, too. And I will never forget how quiet it was. All the noise, all the lights and the booze and the music and the machines and the ships and the people, all of that was gone and it was so...peaceful. We all just stood there. I mean, who were we supposed to rescue? There weren't any survivors. There wasn't even a piece of rock anywhere bigger than your fist."
JJaq pressed his hand into the puddle of juma and smeared it in an arc over the floor. Man, this headache was getting worse. The pressure was like someone was pressing the palm of their hand into his forehead, pushing him over backwards. "And the strangest thing was, I didn't feel a damn thing. Not a damn thing. There I was, standing right there, in the place where I'd had more fights and more sex and more booze, won and lost more money, had some of the best times in my life, and been as close as I ever got to putting a blaster in my mouth--" He hadn't meant to say that. Dammit. Damn the juma and damn him for drinking it. And double damn the headache. Even in his eyes, he could feel his vision shift, blur, and slide back into place. He flicked a look over at the Jedi. She didn't seem to have noticed. If anything, she seemed a little blank-eyed, like she was staring at a point just beyond him. But then she snapped out of it and looked up at him as though waiting for him, encouraging him, to continue.
"I was in the middle of this place," he said, "this place where I'd known all these people and had all this stuff happen, and I felt nothing. Dead still outside, dead still inside. No emotion. There was no emotion. There was only peace. And that's when I figured it out, that Jedi code, and why the Jedi just sat around while those people, all those loud, chaotic, emotional, restless people died. Because on Kavoraan, finally...there was no emotion, there was peace."
His voice rose, angry, but the Jedi just stared at him. "And that's when I realized, this is what the Jedi want, this--" he stamped on the floor again, as though it was the planet's surface, "this is what all the Jedi teaching points to, this is where all of those sold-off Jedi orphans end up, right here. This dead planet. There is no emotion, there is peace."
She was nothing more than a pair of dark eyes on the other side of the room. "So if the Mandalorians want to come and trim the trash off the edge of the Republic," he concluded bitterly, "why would the Jedi try and stop them? More peace for them, right? That's why I was so glad when the Sith showed up. Finally, some honest leadership! With the Sith, you want something, you fight for it. The Sith show up, you know the odds are there's gonna be blood, and if you don't have your head on straight, it might be yours. And you know what? That stinks, it really does. It's brutal. But it's honest. So I was like, thank you! Finally, someone who isn't gonna piss on my head and call it rain. I may not agree with all their decisions but at least I won't be sitting around with my thumb up my ass, waiting for a decision while I'm being bombed from orbit. That's why I signed up."
Jaq sat looking at her, disgusted. Did she realize how she'd been suckered? Did she understand? The Sith didn't put her here, the Jedi did. They didn't care about Kavoraan, they didn't care about her, because they couldn't care, because they had no emotions, and they didn't want to care, they just wanted their flat, gray peace.
"So, Jedi," he said finally, "that's me, that's why I'm here. Who are you really? Why are you here? Do you even know?"
The Jedi sat up, pushed his jacket away from her face, and replied in a hoarse whisper. "I'm Phulan Dehvi. I'm here to rescue you."
He stared at her for a moment in complete astonishment, then busted out laughing.