*sighs forlornly* This chapter isn't as cool as the last. I had a great
deal of fun on the prologue, especially with all the imagery and symbolism,
lol. But, the sad fact is that dark imagery is one of the only things that
I can write well. You're going to be getting a lot of angst from me.
*grins* That, and the fact that I'm not too good with action sequences.
:P They don't like me, I don't like them. We avoid each other as much as
possible.
PS: Did I mention that this is pre-SbS? Spoilers for that book pretty soon, lol, but you can't go very far fanfic-wise without running into spoilers for *that* particular little bookie.
= = = = =
Comes the Night: CHAPTER 1
= = = = =
*Three months prior...*
Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan had been a politician for most of her life. At eighteen, she had been the youngest senator ever, working undercover with the then Rebel Alliance, the now New Republic, until her capture by Darth Vader. Since then, she'd served in many other posts, including a good many years as the New Republic's Chief of State. Politics had always been her strength, her specialty.
And, Sith, how she was starting to hate it.
A little more than twenty-five years ago, the Alliance hadn't cared much for politics. They had been a group of rebels fighting against the tyranny of the Empire, a group of starry-eyed farmboys full of patriotism and fervor. No more. Political wrangling between self-serving bureaucrats was now almost as common as it had been in the Imperial Senate all those years ago.
No small part of this, Leia liked to think, though she admitted to herself a bit unfairly, was the fault of Borsk Fey'lya, the Republic's current Chief of State. The violet-eyed Bothan was, at the moment, sitting quite calmly before the Inner Council, even as he proposed a plan that had to potential of bringing the Republic to its knees.
She was doing this for Luke, she reminded herself. For *Luke*. The Jedi needed all the help they could get in the political arena and, like it or not, she was the best qualified to handle that, even if she'd sworn never to touch politics again. *For Luke...*
"Bargaining with the Vong? *Bargaining*? Didn't Ithor teach us a lesson about that?"
Fey'lya just blinked serenely at her. "Indeed it did, Councilor Solo," he soothed, "but we must consider the larger picture. What is one life compared to the safety of the Republic as a whole? What, indeed, is one hundred lives compared to the billions of the Republic?"
"You mean the Jedi." Force-damn it, maybe bluntness wasn't politically correct, but she was getting tired of that....
The Jedi had been losing much of their political support lately. The Senate was nearly deadlocked over the so-called "Jedi question"; with Borsk's Advisory Coucil, the split was much more decisive.
The Bothan favored her with a small smile. "Indeed."
Only intense self-control and long practice prevented Leia's jaw from dropping wide open. Fey'lya had never before openly suggested that the Jedi just be calmly handed over to the Vong. Although she suspected that some senators had been covertly cooperating with the anti-Jedi Peace Brigade, they had the sense to keep it hidden. The opportunistic Fey'lya, of course, wouldn't suggest this unless there was a good chance for success. Perhaps relationships with the Jedi were more strained than she had thought....
"We can't just docilely hand the Jedi over!" she protested. "They're the only reason the Vong aren't on Coruscant yet! Without the Jedi--"
"-- without the Jedi, we'd still have a truce!" Chelch Dravvad interrupted, snarling. The Corellian, along most other senators from the Coreworlds, had little interest in preserving the Jedi Order, preferring, instead, to cooperate with the Vong as long as they stopped their Coreward press. "Wasn't it the Jedi that destroyed their new worldship at Serndipal?"
Leia struggled to quell an irrational bit of anger at the mention of that particular planet. *Oh, Chewie...* "Kyp Durron was not acting with approval from the higher members of the Order. My brother--"
"You're brother, I'm afraid, Councilor Organa, is the exception rather than the rule," Senator Pwoe interrupted. The Quarren, indeed, was somewhat of an exception, too. While most Quarren were gentle despite their strange appearances, the cold-blooded, ambitious Pwoe was an exception to the rule. "As the Chief of State said, what is one life in comparison with the fate of the galaxy?"
"Surely you wouldn't trust the Vong again! After their betrayal at Ithor, how can we believe anything they say?"
"I was under the impression that Ithor had been the fault of a Jedi, Corran Horn," Fyor Rodan said mildly.
Triebakk the Wookie growled something in his own tongue. Among the members of the Inner Council, only the Wookie and Cal Omas, the senator from Leia's homeplanet of Alderaan, had remained pro-Jedi. The others, Dravvad, Pwoe, Rodan, and Niuk Niuv of Sullust were all extremely anti-Jedi.
Well, all except for Viqi Shesh of Kuat. She was a relative unknown, having entered into politics only recently. Some ambiguous feeling, though, made Leia a bit disinclined to trust her.
Before the Wookie's comment could be translated by his handy-dandy translator droid, though, Fey'lya's commlink buzzed. "What?" he snapped.
"There's ... security breach!" the voice on the other end, obscured by static, exclaimed. "Master-- ... traitor-- . shot him with-- ... lightsaber-- ... on his way to--" The crackling resumed, the voice cut off.
Leia took in a deep breath and quickly cast her eye around the room. Fey'lya's anti-Jedi supporters were looking rather smug, their feelings and intuitions looking as if they were about to be proven correct. The pro- Jedi councilors were looking a bit chagrined. Shesh was unreadable.
Fey'lya bared his teeth at her in what may have been a smile. "So... what do you say now, Councilor Solo?"
= = = = =
"There's been a security breach!" he hissed into the commlink. This passageway, one of many in the ruins of the old Imperial palace, was a decent hiding place, but he didn't know what crazed Jedi could do. "A security breach!" Sith, they had to hear this! If that lunatic made it to the Inner Council, Force only knew what he would do. "Master Skywalker's gone mad! He's raving about some traitor, or an ambush, or something like that. We shot him with tranquilizers, but he's still going. He has his lightsaber, and he's on his way to--"
The man let out a violent oath. Of all the times, the commlink's batteries had chosen to give out *now*. The guard checked his blaster, set it to "kill," and stepped out of his hiding place. If he was going to die, then he would at least die fighting like a man.
= = = = =
"So... what do you say now, Councilor Solo?"
Leia ignored him. For the moment at least. She reached out her senses, trying to find the mysterious intruder. Although, unlike her children, she had never had the time to get formal training at Luke's academy, she had more than enough latent ability to find the disturbance.
She physically recoiled when she found it. A whirlwind of fiery hatred and deepest despair was making its way towards the Advisory Council, leaving a wide path of destruction as it came. The worst part, though, was that she knew this person; even veiled in darkness, the light shown through. If only she could recognize it....
"Councilor Solo!" Fey'lya barked, interrupting her reverie.
Leia blinked, her connection lost. "Dark Jedi." Although that wasn't exactly true. The person hadn't exactly turned yet, per se, although he was caught up in the violent passions that constituted the Dark Side of the Force.
"I thought so," Dravvad drawled, leaning back with a smirk. "Didn't we always say that the Jedi were trouble?"
Triebakk growled a reply. His translator droid gave it in Basic, "Dark Jedi are not Jedi. Not at all."
The Corellian shrugged. "Close enough." Dravvad had never really cared about the technicalities of the light and dark sides of the Force. He was, at best, a skeptic when he chose to accept these things at all. Maybe it was a cultural thing. Force knew that Han had never really believed in the Force... until he'd met Obi-Wan and Luke, that is.
*No mystical energy-field controls *my* life!*
Leia hid the smile that the thought brought. She hadn't been there when it'd happened, but she'd heard the story more than enough times. The comment was so typically Han, though; she could just picture the scruffy- looking nerfherder of twenty-five plus years ago saying exactly that.
Before they could start a philosophical discussion on the nature of the Force, though, Leia's fine-tuned Jedi senses alerted her to imminent danger. "Shh!" she snapped, gesturing sharply. The room almost immediately settled into an uneasy silence, atypical of the Advisory Coucil, but welcome all the same. Leia cocked her ear towards the door. "Did you hear that?"
Fey'lya snorted, though it seemed a bit uncertain to Leia. "Nonsense," he scoffed, his cream-colored fur rippling in agitation. "There's no one."
The Bothan had the best ears of the group; he did not, however, possess Leia's hereditary connection to the Force. The sound came again, a bit louder this time, loud enough for every person in the room to hear. "Blaster fire," Leia surmised. "They're getting closer."
The room quieted even further. The noises grew gradually louder and louder, the *snap-hiss* of a lightsaber's activation joining in at one point. The Council members, most of whom had never seen a blaster, not to mention a full-fledged battle, were just... sitting.
Listening.
Waiting.
Leia, for her part, was frozen with horror. She *knew* who it was. Even buried under the layers of despair, anger, she could still recognize the man at the core. But it *couldn't* be. *NO!*
Suddenly, it all stopped. The blaster fire ceased, but, to Leia's consternation, the moaning of the wounded started. But, judging from the homicidal rage he was in, the ones able to moan at all might be considered lucky.
Footsteps. Thump. Thump.
The door was locked, thankfully. Pwo shot a shaky smile at the rest of the Council. "See?" he asked with false bravado. "We'll be safe in here. Nothing to it. We'll just stay here and wait him out; the guards will be here soon and--" He babbled on and on, not managing to convince anyone that he was actually not afraid.
*You don't know the power of the Dark Side.*
The door burst inwards with a sudden blast, showering much of the room with a wood-chip fireworks display. And, silhouetted in the doorway was a dark, cloaked form, --
"Skywalker!" someone gasped. Leia didn't bother to turn her head to see whom.
Luke. It was Luke, in a way. If Luke would had ever burst into the Advisory Council after slicing his way through the guards, this would have been Luke.
His blue eyes were burning with hatred, with anger, the flames behind them leaping and twisting, making it seem as if those sapphire orbs were engaged in a mad war dance. His lips were pulled back in a sneer of malice. "You," he snarled, pointing his still-ignited blade at Fey'lya. "Traitor."
She didn't really remember what she did then, but the next moment, Leia found herself interposed between her brother and the Chief of State. "Luke!"
His eyes met hers for a moment, the hatred in that icy gaze faltering ever so slightly. His eyes flickered back to the Bothan and hardened back to adamantine. "Get out of my way, Leia," he hissed softly. "That traitor deserves to die."
Fey'lya stood up and spread his arms in a peaceful gesture. "What is this, Master Skywalker?" he demanded. "What--"
"Shut up!" Luke commanded, trying to advance on the defenseless politician. Leia kept him back. "You- you know what you did," he growled, the hate seeming to falter again and giving way to raw grief. "Mara."
"What about Mara?" Leia asked, cold fingers of fear creeping up her spine. If something had happened to Mara-- just how far would Luke go?
He glanced back down at her. "She's gone," he whispered brokenly, slumping downwards as the anger slowly bled out, quickly replaced with raw grief and sorrow. "Dead. We were ambushed just outside Coruscant. Peace Brigaders and some of the Vong's new pets. They tracked us through the Force and--" he broke off, shoulders heaving with dry sobs.
"Oh, Luke," Leia whispered, kneeling down to comfort her brother. "There wasn't anything you could have done--"
"No," he interrupted, bringing his head back up. "Maybe not. But there's something I can do now." He stood back up, the grief gone as if it had never been, and pointed his lightsaber at the Bothan Chief of State. "Someone betrayed us," he hissed. "Someone powerful, with no love for Jedi. They couldn't have known where we were without some inside information. And the only people who knew where we would be are in this room right now." He raised his lightsaber high over his head, preparing to take off Fey'lya's head--
"Luke, no!" Leia shouted in vain, trying to reach her brother.
He ignored her, but couldn't ignore the armed reinforcements that then flooded into the room.
= = = = =
(A/N: A word of warning: I don't write action sequences very well, lol. Just so you know. I apologize in advance for this sad excuse for a combat scene.)
= = = = =
He whirled around, snarling, the moment he felt the guards rush in. Fey'lya would have to wait. But not for long.
*Only a score. How very insulting.*
That was the moment the other squad chose to arrive, augmenting the original force with another forty or so, all armed to the teeth with blasters of every possible make and model, among many other things.
*Or maybe not,* he amended, grinning wickedly.
This was going to be rather interesting.
= = = = =
*This room was *not * meant to be used as a battlefield,* Leia thought with an oddly detached corner of her mind, watching as her brother, grinning from ear-to-ear with a mad smile that sent shivers up her spine, quite calmly deflected blaster bolts to all corners of the room.
The various members of the Advisory Council were cowering behind the overturned desks, though Triebakk looked as if he wanted to rush out and fight like the Wookie he was.
The first three guards, covered by their comrades' blaster-fire, hesitantly entered the room, probably expecting to be broiled with lightning, sliced in half, or any of the other thousand terrible things that maddened Jedi can do-- and nothing happened. Luke, it seemed, was too busy blocking the deadly red blaster bolts to be bothered with them, for now at least.
Emboldened with their fellows' successes, the next few tried to push their way through the door-- to be suddenly stopped, as if by an invisible wall. *Okay, so maybe not.*
Even so, though, there were already three men in the room that Luke couldn't stop without leaving himself open to blaster fire. Leia's heart leapt at the thought. Maybe, just maybe, the three of them could manage to temporarily incapacitate him. These weren't stormtroopers, after all.
*Unlikely.*
Luke's smile just widened when he saw the three guards advancing on him, vibroblades drawn. *Vibroblades against a lightsaber. Smart.* Apparently, no one had taught them about the lethality of your average lightsaber.
*Mental note to self: Update guard training classes.*
Luke switched his blade to his left hand, still blocking every bolt that came his way. With his other hand, he reached inside his robe, removing another lightsaber. He thumbed it on with a *snap-hiss*, sending out a white-blue blade--
White-blue. *Oh, dear Maker, that's *Mara's* lightsaber.*
Up until that moment, Leia hadn't really accepted the fact that she was gone. Really, truly gone. The Skywalker-Solo family had always led a charmed existence, escaping from every conceivable life-death situation, and then some. Until Serndipal. Until Chewie. Chewbacca's death had been a wake-up call, a rude awakening to the fact that, yes, they *were* mortal, could, indeed, be killed like everyone else. To lose Mara, too, though, so soon after--
He threw his emerald-green blade at the door. No, not at the door. At the door's control panel. It slid shut with a *WHUMP!*, sealing the reinforcements outside and the three hapless guards within.
Silence. Near silence in the sudden absence of blaster-fire, only the humming of the light-blue blade. Even from her vantage point, Leia could hear one of the men quite audibly gulp.
Luke's maniacal grin never faltered. "Who's first?" he hissed, waving them on with Mara's blade.
The first of the three, an either very brave or very stupid muscular human male, advanced cautiously, vibroblade held high over his head.
Three seconds later he was on the floor, writhing in agony, thanks to the gaping wound across his stomach.
He turned to the other two. "Surrender?" he asked casually, still idly twirling the lightsaber.
They surrendered.
"Pick those back up!" Fey'lya barked at the two guards, his voice strained and panicky. "I'm the Chief of State! You can't leave me to this maniac!" The two just shook their heads dumbly, eyes wide with fear. "What are you paid for, then?" he cried in exasperation.
"Come now, Chief Fey'lya," Luke said, smiling, "you can't really expect them to deliberately lay down their lives for you. Or," he amended, "maybe you *can*, but, maybe this time they know who's actually in the right."
He strode over to the Chief of State's hiding place. Was it Leia's imagination, or was there a little lurch in his step? "How fitting that you should die at the end of her blade," he murmured, raising Mara's lightsaber for a killing stroke.
"Luke! You can't do this!" Leia shouted, attracting his attention yet again. *Oh, Force, why am I trying to save Fey'lya??*
He turned back to her, eyes blazing. Leia took an involuntary step back at the sheer hatred in his eyes. " 'Can't do this', " he mimicked derisively. "I *can* do this, Leia. And I will. He killed my wife. Without his intervention, Ma-- Mara would still be here. He dies." He raised the blade again--
"What would Mara say?" Leia asked desperately, groping for a means to delay the inevitable for a little longer, if only a few more seconds. Luke froze, the saber still held high, ready for the final stroke. "What would she say?" Leia whispered. "Would she want you to avenge her? Or would she want you to move on?"
He thumbed off the blade, to Leia's utter relief, and turned to face her. Though his face remained almost totally expressionless, his eyes betrayed the feelings at war inside. The anger was still there, certainly, the bitter hatred, but something else was starting to overcome it, too. "Mara," he muttered, his voice definitely a bit slurred now. "She--"
One of the guards, of course, chose this exact moment to fire. Luke blocked it with his left hand. Instead of a blaster bolt, though, the man had fired a tranquilizer; Luke brushed it aside as another might brush away an especially annoying insect, enraged, but otherwise unaffected.
The man gulped. Audibly.
"Not enough," Luke informed him, raising his other hand, fingers splayed. Tendrils of blue-white lightning shot out of his fingertips, wrapping themselves around the luckless man. His screams of utter agony echoed off the walls, making it sound as if many were screaming rather than just one. And, dammit, Luke's grin just widened.
Despite herself, the only thing Leia could think of right now was Threepio. *We're DOOMED!*
= = = = =
He stopped the lightning as soon as it was obvious that the man wasn't going anywhere soon and turned back to Fey'lya, swaying slightly on his feet. "Now where were we?" he asked, voice a bit slurred, as if he'd been drinking.
Had he been drinking? He didn't think so....
Maybe this was all a dream, then. Yeah, that's it, a dream. Mara wasn't really dead, he wasn't really standing over the Chief of State with Mara's lightsaber poised over the Bothan's head for the killing blow.
Yeah, that's it. All a dream.
Blackness was starting to creep into the edges of his vision. What was going on, exactly?
The door burst inwards with a sudden thump. Apparently, someone had managed to hotwire the system. He turned back towards the door, where reinforcements were again flooding into the room--
--and collapsed. The last thing he heard before totally blacking out was, "Someone check the expiration date on these F***ING tranquilizers!!"
= = = = =
Leia could only watch numbly as they loaded the unconscious Luke and his moaning victims onto the speeder to take them to the nearest medbay. Too many, way too many things were happening at once. Mara was dead, Luke was incapacitated by grief, and Force only knew what was happening to her children on Mykyr.
"Well," Pwoe remarked, "I suppose we'll have to wait until the trial to see what's really going on."
That snapped Leia out of her reverie. "Trial?" she demanded. "What trial?"
The Quarren blinked serenely at her. "Skywalker's trial, of course," he answered. "He broke into an Advisory Council meeting, attempted to assasinate the Chief of State, and injured, possibly *killed*, many of our guards. Of course," he added, a bit regretfully, it seemed to Leia, "we might never know the truth about Borsk's so-called 'betrayal'. A pity, that."
*Yeah, right,* Leia thought darkly. The ambitious Quarren was probably only regretting that any truth about a breach of trust of Fey'lya's might have put him in the running for the next Chief of State, provided that he could secure a vote of no confidence.
It hadn't been Fey'lya. Leia knew it, knew it with a gut feeling, a feeling that went deeper than conscious thought. She just knew. It had been someone else, someone who wanted to discredit the wily Bothan.
Viqi Shesh put a hand on Leia's shoulder sympathetically. "It's a pity about Mara, isn't it?" she queried, feigning sorrow. "One must feel for Master Skywalker. He must be feeling so upset.... A pity, indeed."
= = = = =
A/N: Otay, who do YOU think the traitor is? *winks* It's a bit obvious, isn't it? But, then again, my answers are almost never the obvious ones. Or am I just trying to confuse you?? ... Oh well.
And who saw MIB II? *raises hand* Remember the line about giant worm tranquilizers? *grins*
Mara's death covered in detail next time, I hope. Will probably be a lot darker, and, therefore a lot better written, lol. My writing is just like that. But it might take a while.
PS: Did I mention that this is pre-SbS? Spoilers for that book pretty soon, lol, but you can't go very far fanfic-wise without running into spoilers for *that* particular little bookie.
= = = = =
Comes the Night: CHAPTER 1
= = = = =
*Three months prior...*
Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan had been a politician for most of her life. At eighteen, she had been the youngest senator ever, working undercover with the then Rebel Alliance, the now New Republic, until her capture by Darth Vader. Since then, she'd served in many other posts, including a good many years as the New Republic's Chief of State. Politics had always been her strength, her specialty.
And, Sith, how she was starting to hate it.
A little more than twenty-five years ago, the Alliance hadn't cared much for politics. They had been a group of rebels fighting against the tyranny of the Empire, a group of starry-eyed farmboys full of patriotism and fervor. No more. Political wrangling between self-serving bureaucrats was now almost as common as it had been in the Imperial Senate all those years ago.
No small part of this, Leia liked to think, though she admitted to herself a bit unfairly, was the fault of Borsk Fey'lya, the Republic's current Chief of State. The violet-eyed Bothan was, at the moment, sitting quite calmly before the Inner Council, even as he proposed a plan that had to potential of bringing the Republic to its knees.
She was doing this for Luke, she reminded herself. For *Luke*. The Jedi needed all the help they could get in the political arena and, like it or not, she was the best qualified to handle that, even if she'd sworn never to touch politics again. *For Luke...*
"Bargaining with the Vong? *Bargaining*? Didn't Ithor teach us a lesson about that?"
Fey'lya just blinked serenely at her. "Indeed it did, Councilor Solo," he soothed, "but we must consider the larger picture. What is one life compared to the safety of the Republic as a whole? What, indeed, is one hundred lives compared to the billions of the Republic?"
"You mean the Jedi." Force-damn it, maybe bluntness wasn't politically correct, but she was getting tired of that....
The Jedi had been losing much of their political support lately. The Senate was nearly deadlocked over the so-called "Jedi question"; with Borsk's Advisory Coucil, the split was much more decisive.
The Bothan favored her with a small smile. "Indeed."
Only intense self-control and long practice prevented Leia's jaw from dropping wide open. Fey'lya had never before openly suggested that the Jedi just be calmly handed over to the Vong. Although she suspected that some senators had been covertly cooperating with the anti-Jedi Peace Brigade, they had the sense to keep it hidden. The opportunistic Fey'lya, of course, wouldn't suggest this unless there was a good chance for success. Perhaps relationships with the Jedi were more strained than she had thought....
"We can't just docilely hand the Jedi over!" she protested. "They're the only reason the Vong aren't on Coruscant yet! Without the Jedi--"
"-- without the Jedi, we'd still have a truce!" Chelch Dravvad interrupted, snarling. The Corellian, along most other senators from the Coreworlds, had little interest in preserving the Jedi Order, preferring, instead, to cooperate with the Vong as long as they stopped their Coreward press. "Wasn't it the Jedi that destroyed their new worldship at Serndipal?"
Leia struggled to quell an irrational bit of anger at the mention of that particular planet. *Oh, Chewie...* "Kyp Durron was not acting with approval from the higher members of the Order. My brother--"
"You're brother, I'm afraid, Councilor Organa, is the exception rather than the rule," Senator Pwoe interrupted. The Quarren, indeed, was somewhat of an exception, too. While most Quarren were gentle despite their strange appearances, the cold-blooded, ambitious Pwoe was an exception to the rule. "As the Chief of State said, what is one life in comparison with the fate of the galaxy?"
"Surely you wouldn't trust the Vong again! After their betrayal at Ithor, how can we believe anything they say?"
"I was under the impression that Ithor had been the fault of a Jedi, Corran Horn," Fyor Rodan said mildly.
Triebakk the Wookie growled something in his own tongue. Among the members of the Inner Council, only the Wookie and Cal Omas, the senator from Leia's homeplanet of Alderaan, had remained pro-Jedi. The others, Dravvad, Pwoe, Rodan, and Niuk Niuv of Sullust were all extremely anti-Jedi.
Well, all except for Viqi Shesh of Kuat. She was a relative unknown, having entered into politics only recently. Some ambiguous feeling, though, made Leia a bit disinclined to trust her.
Before the Wookie's comment could be translated by his handy-dandy translator droid, though, Fey'lya's commlink buzzed. "What?" he snapped.
"There's ... security breach!" the voice on the other end, obscured by static, exclaimed. "Master-- ... traitor-- . shot him with-- ... lightsaber-- ... on his way to--" The crackling resumed, the voice cut off.
Leia took in a deep breath and quickly cast her eye around the room. Fey'lya's anti-Jedi supporters were looking rather smug, their feelings and intuitions looking as if they were about to be proven correct. The pro- Jedi councilors were looking a bit chagrined. Shesh was unreadable.
Fey'lya bared his teeth at her in what may have been a smile. "So... what do you say now, Councilor Solo?"
= = = = =
"There's been a security breach!" he hissed into the commlink. This passageway, one of many in the ruins of the old Imperial palace, was a decent hiding place, but he didn't know what crazed Jedi could do. "A security breach!" Sith, they had to hear this! If that lunatic made it to the Inner Council, Force only knew what he would do. "Master Skywalker's gone mad! He's raving about some traitor, or an ambush, or something like that. We shot him with tranquilizers, but he's still going. He has his lightsaber, and he's on his way to--"
The man let out a violent oath. Of all the times, the commlink's batteries had chosen to give out *now*. The guard checked his blaster, set it to "kill," and stepped out of his hiding place. If he was going to die, then he would at least die fighting like a man.
= = = = =
"So... what do you say now, Councilor Solo?"
Leia ignored him. For the moment at least. She reached out her senses, trying to find the mysterious intruder. Although, unlike her children, she had never had the time to get formal training at Luke's academy, she had more than enough latent ability to find the disturbance.
She physically recoiled when she found it. A whirlwind of fiery hatred and deepest despair was making its way towards the Advisory Council, leaving a wide path of destruction as it came. The worst part, though, was that she knew this person; even veiled in darkness, the light shown through. If only she could recognize it....
"Councilor Solo!" Fey'lya barked, interrupting her reverie.
Leia blinked, her connection lost. "Dark Jedi." Although that wasn't exactly true. The person hadn't exactly turned yet, per se, although he was caught up in the violent passions that constituted the Dark Side of the Force.
"I thought so," Dravvad drawled, leaning back with a smirk. "Didn't we always say that the Jedi were trouble?"
Triebakk growled a reply. His translator droid gave it in Basic, "Dark Jedi are not Jedi. Not at all."
The Corellian shrugged. "Close enough." Dravvad had never really cared about the technicalities of the light and dark sides of the Force. He was, at best, a skeptic when he chose to accept these things at all. Maybe it was a cultural thing. Force knew that Han had never really believed in the Force... until he'd met Obi-Wan and Luke, that is.
*No mystical energy-field controls *my* life!*
Leia hid the smile that the thought brought. She hadn't been there when it'd happened, but she'd heard the story more than enough times. The comment was so typically Han, though; she could just picture the scruffy- looking nerfherder of twenty-five plus years ago saying exactly that.
Before they could start a philosophical discussion on the nature of the Force, though, Leia's fine-tuned Jedi senses alerted her to imminent danger. "Shh!" she snapped, gesturing sharply. The room almost immediately settled into an uneasy silence, atypical of the Advisory Coucil, but welcome all the same. Leia cocked her ear towards the door. "Did you hear that?"
Fey'lya snorted, though it seemed a bit uncertain to Leia. "Nonsense," he scoffed, his cream-colored fur rippling in agitation. "There's no one."
The Bothan had the best ears of the group; he did not, however, possess Leia's hereditary connection to the Force. The sound came again, a bit louder this time, loud enough for every person in the room to hear. "Blaster fire," Leia surmised. "They're getting closer."
The room quieted even further. The noises grew gradually louder and louder, the *snap-hiss* of a lightsaber's activation joining in at one point. The Council members, most of whom had never seen a blaster, not to mention a full-fledged battle, were just... sitting.
Listening.
Waiting.
Leia, for her part, was frozen with horror. She *knew* who it was. Even buried under the layers of despair, anger, she could still recognize the man at the core. But it *couldn't* be. *NO!*
Suddenly, it all stopped. The blaster fire ceased, but, to Leia's consternation, the moaning of the wounded started. But, judging from the homicidal rage he was in, the ones able to moan at all might be considered lucky.
Footsteps. Thump. Thump.
The door was locked, thankfully. Pwo shot a shaky smile at the rest of the Council. "See?" he asked with false bravado. "We'll be safe in here. Nothing to it. We'll just stay here and wait him out; the guards will be here soon and--" He babbled on and on, not managing to convince anyone that he was actually not afraid.
*You don't know the power of the Dark Side.*
The door burst inwards with a sudden blast, showering much of the room with a wood-chip fireworks display. And, silhouetted in the doorway was a dark, cloaked form, --
"Skywalker!" someone gasped. Leia didn't bother to turn her head to see whom.
Luke. It was Luke, in a way. If Luke would had ever burst into the Advisory Council after slicing his way through the guards, this would have been Luke.
His blue eyes were burning with hatred, with anger, the flames behind them leaping and twisting, making it seem as if those sapphire orbs were engaged in a mad war dance. His lips were pulled back in a sneer of malice. "You," he snarled, pointing his still-ignited blade at Fey'lya. "Traitor."
She didn't really remember what she did then, but the next moment, Leia found herself interposed between her brother and the Chief of State. "Luke!"
His eyes met hers for a moment, the hatred in that icy gaze faltering ever so slightly. His eyes flickered back to the Bothan and hardened back to adamantine. "Get out of my way, Leia," he hissed softly. "That traitor deserves to die."
Fey'lya stood up and spread his arms in a peaceful gesture. "What is this, Master Skywalker?" he demanded. "What--"
"Shut up!" Luke commanded, trying to advance on the defenseless politician. Leia kept him back. "You- you know what you did," he growled, the hate seeming to falter again and giving way to raw grief. "Mara."
"What about Mara?" Leia asked, cold fingers of fear creeping up her spine. If something had happened to Mara-- just how far would Luke go?
He glanced back down at her. "She's gone," he whispered brokenly, slumping downwards as the anger slowly bled out, quickly replaced with raw grief and sorrow. "Dead. We were ambushed just outside Coruscant. Peace Brigaders and some of the Vong's new pets. They tracked us through the Force and--" he broke off, shoulders heaving with dry sobs.
"Oh, Luke," Leia whispered, kneeling down to comfort her brother. "There wasn't anything you could have done--"
"No," he interrupted, bringing his head back up. "Maybe not. But there's something I can do now." He stood back up, the grief gone as if it had never been, and pointed his lightsaber at the Bothan Chief of State. "Someone betrayed us," he hissed. "Someone powerful, with no love for Jedi. They couldn't have known where we were without some inside information. And the only people who knew where we would be are in this room right now." He raised his lightsaber high over his head, preparing to take off Fey'lya's head--
"Luke, no!" Leia shouted in vain, trying to reach her brother.
He ignored her, but couldn't ignore the armed reinforcements that then flooded into the room.
= = = = =
(A/N: A word of warning: I don't write action sequences very well, lol. Just so you know. I apologize in advance for this sad excuse for a combat scene.)
= = = = =
He whirled around, snarling, the moment he felt the guards rush in. Fey'lya would have to wait. But not for long.
*Only a score. How very insulting.*
That was the moment the other squad chose to arrive, augmenting the original force with another forty or so, all armed to the teeth with blasters of every possible make and model, among many other things.
*Or maybe not,* he amended, grinning wickedly.
This was going to be rather interesting.
= = = = =
*This room was *not * meant to be used as a battlefield,* Leia thought with an oddly detached corner of her mind, watching as her brother, grinning from ear-to-ear with a mad smile that sent shivers up her spine, quite calmly deflected blaster bolts to all corners of the room.
The various members of the Advisory Council were cowering behind the overturned desks, though Triebakk looked as if he wanted to rush out and fight like the Wookie he was.
The first three guards, covered by their comrades' blaster-fire, hesitantly entered the room, probably expecting to be broiled with lightning, sliced in half, or any of the other thousand terrible things that maddened Jedi can do-- and nothing happened. Luke, it seemed, was too busy blocking the deadly red blaster bolts to be bothered with them, for now at least.
Emboldened with their fellows' successes, the next few tried to push their way through the door-- to be suddenly stopped, as if by an invisible wall. *Okay, so maybe not.*
Even so, though, there were already three men in the room that Luke couldn't stop without leaving himself open to blaster fire. Leia's heart leapt at the thought. Maybe, just maybe, the three of them could manage to temporarily incapacitate him. These weren't stormtroopers, after all.
*Unlikely.*
Luke's smile just widened when he saw the three guards advancing on him, vibroblades drawn. *Vibroblades against a lightsaber. Smart.* Apparently, no one had taught them about the lethality of your average lightsaber.
*Mental note to self: Update guard training classes.*
Luke switched his blade to his left hand, still blocking every bolt that came his way. With his other hand, he reached inside his robe, removing another lightsaber. He thumbed it on with a *snap-hiss*, sending out a white-blue blade--
White-blue. *Oh, dear Maker, that's *Mara's* lightsaber.*
Up until that moment, Leia hadn't really accepted the fact that she was gone. Really, truly gone. The Skywalker-Solo family had always led a charmed existence, escaping from every conceivable life-death situation, and then some. Until Serndipal. Until Chewie. Chewbacca's death had been a wake-up call, a rude awakening to the fact that, yes, they *were* mortal, could, indeed, be killed like everyone else. To lose Mara, too, though, so soon after--
He threw his emerald-green blade at the door. No, not at the door. At the door's control panel. It slid shut with a *WHUMP!*, sealing the reinforcements outside and the three hapless guards within.
Silence. Near silence in the sudden absence of blaster-fire, only the humming of the light-blue blade. Even from her vantage point, Leia could hear one of the men quite audibly gulp.
Luke's maniacal grin never faltered. "Who's first?" he hissed, waving them on with Mara's blade.
The first of the three, an either very brave or very stupid muscular human male, advanced cautiously, vibroblade held high over his head.
Three seconds later he was on the floor, writhing in agony, thanks to the gaping wound across his stomach.
He turned to the other two. "Surrender?" he asked casually, still idly twirling the lightsaber.
They surrendered.
"Pick those back up!" Fey'lya barked at the two guards, his voice strained and panicky. "I'm the Chief of State! You can't leave me to this maniac!" The two just shook their heads dumbly, eyes wide with fear. "What are you paid for, then?" he cried in exasperation.
"Come now, Chief Fey'lya," Luke said, smiling, "you can't really expect them to deliberately lay down their lives for you. Or," he amended, "maybe you *can*, but, maybe this time they know who's actually in the right."
He strode over to the Chief of State's hiding place. Was it Leia's imagination, or was there a little lurch in his step? "How fitting that you should die at the end of her blade," he murmured, raising Mara's lightsaber for a killing stroke.
"Luke! You can't do this!" Leia shouted, attracting his attention yet again. *Oh, Force, why am I trying to save Fey'lya??*
He turned back to her, eyes blazing. Leia took an involuntary step back at the sheer hatred in his eyes. " 'Can't do this', " he mimicked derisively. "I *can* do this, Leia. And I will. He killed my wife. Without his intervention, Ma-- Mara would still be here. He dies." He raised the blade again--
"What would Mara say?" Leia asked desperately, groping for a means to delay the inevitable for a little longer, if only a few more seconds. Luke froze, the saber still held high, ready for the final stroke. "What would she say?" Leia whispered. "Would she want you to avenge her? Or would she want you to move on?"
He thumbed off the blade, to Leia's utter relief, and turned to face her. Though his face remained almost totally expressionless, his eyes betrayed the feelings at war inside. The anger was still there, certainly, the bitter hatred, but something else was starting to overcome it, too. "Mara," he muttered, his voice definitely a bit slurred now. "She--"
One of the guards, of course, chose this exact moment to fire. Luke blocked it with his left hand. Instead of a blaster bolt, though, the man had fired a tranquilizer; Luke brushed it aside as another might brush away an especially annoying insect, enraged, but otherwise unaffected.
The man gulped. Audibly.
"Not enough," Luke informed him, raising his other hand, fingers splayed. Tendrils of blue-white lightning shot out of his fingertips, wrapping themselves around the luckless man. His screams of utter agony echoed off the walls, making it sound as if many were screaming rather than just one. And, dammit, Luke's grin just widened.
Despite herself, the only thing Leia could think of right now was Threepio. *We're DOOMED!*
= = = = =
He stopped the lightning as soon as it was obvious that the man wasn't going anywhere soon and turned back to Fey'lya, swaying slightly on his feet. "Now where were we?" he asked, voice a bit slurred, as if he'd been drinking.
Had he been drinking? He didn't think so....
Maybe this was all a dream, then. Yeah, that's it, a dream. Mara wasn't really dead, he wasn't really standing over the Chief of State with Mara's lightsaber poised over the Bothan's head for the killing blow.
Yeah, that's it. All a dream.
Blackness was starting to creep into the edges of his vision. What was going on, exactly?
The door burst inwards with a sudden thump. Apparently, someone had managed to hotwire the system. He turned back towards the door, where reinforcements were again flooding into the room--
--and collapsed. The last thing he heard before totally blacking out was, "Someone check the expiration date on these F***ING tranquilizers!!"
= = = = =
Leia could only watch numbly as they loaded the unconscious Luke and his moaning victims onto the speeder to take them to the nearest medbay. Too many, way too many things were happening at once. Mara was dead, Luke was incapacitated by grief, and Force only knew what was happening to her children on Mykyr.
"Well," Pwoe remarked, "I suppose we'll have to wait until the trial to see what's really going on."
That snapped Leia out of her reverie. "Trial?" she demanded. "What trial?"
The Quarren blinked serenely at her. "Skywalker's trial, of course," he answered. "He broke into an Advisory Council meeting, attempted to assasinate the Chief of State, and injured, possibly *killed*, many of our guards. Of course," he added, a bit regretfully, it seemed to Leia, "we might never know the truth about Borsk's so-called 'betrayal'. A pity, that."
*Yeah, right,* Leia thought darkly. The ambitious Quarren was probably only regretting that any truth about a breach of trust of Fey'lya's might have put him in the running for the next Chief of State, provided that he could secure a vote of no confidence.
It hadn't been Fey'lya. Leia knew it, knew it with a gut feeling, a feeling that went deeper than conscious thought. She just knew. It had been someone else, someone who wanted to discredit the wily Bothan.
Viqi Shesh put a hand on Leia's shoulder sympathetically. "It's a pity about Mara, isn't it?" she queried, feigning sorrow. "One must feel for Master Skywalker. He must be feeling so upset.... A pity, indeed."
= = = = =
A/N: Otay, who do YOU think the traitor is? *winks* It's a bit obvious, isn't it? But, then again, my answers are almost never the obvious ones. Or am I just trying to confuse you?? ... Oh well.
And who saw MIB II? *raises hand* Remember the line about giant worm tranquilizers? *grins*
Mara's death covered in detail next time, I hope. Will probably be a lot darker, and, therefore a lot better written, lol. My writing is just like that. But it might take a while.