Legacy V
Chapter 3
Nocturne
"Ow!"
Anakin promptly shoved the offended digit into his mouth, assuaging the sting left by the med-droid's blood-sampler.
"Sorry," Bant Eerin soothed her young charge. "I should have warned you."
The boy sucked on his finger, watching the hovering mechanical tech insert the sample plate into a compact analyzer. "What's it checking for now? More infections? I took a bath last week. With cleansing powder and everything,"
The Mon Cal stifled her amused chuckle with a small cough and made herself busy reviewing the scanner results. The newcomer was not only illness-free, he was in the very flush of health, atypically of children raised under the harsh strictures of slavery. There were traces of welts and weals on his back and thighs, marks left – he had stoically, almost callously informed her – by his previous owner, Watto. There were recent bruises and a sprain or two earned crashing a podracer and interfering in the scuffle between "Mister Obi-Wan" and a fearsome horned warrior. And there were a predictable number of small parasites crawling in his mop of sun-bleached hair – but beyond these trifling maladies, Anakin was a bundle of pure unsullied vitality.
And the Force was very strong with him, she had to admit. His presence was like one of the heat lamps that kept the hydroponic enclosures in the Temple gardens warm during winter season.
She glanced up from the datapad when Master Li bustled in, double checking MD-41's analyzer sample. The master healer took one look at the reading, bushy eyebrows rising nearly to his high hairline, then fixed the visitor with a very penetrating look.
"Am I sick?"Anakin yelped, immediately inferring the discovery of some catastrophic occult symptom.
"No. You, sir, are a conundrum." Ben To stroked his beard into a perfect point and snorted.
His young interlocutor wrinkled his nose in confusion. "Is that… bad? Can I stay?"
Bant huffed impatiently. "It is not bad, and you are welcome to stay. Isn't that right, Master?"
Chivvied out of an indignant theoretical snit by his apprentice's not-so-subtle prompting, Master Li snapped back into his habitual bedside manner. Which is to say, he shooed the med unit out the door, pocketed the analyzer chit, brusquely informed Anakin that he would spend the night 'under observation' but would be supplied with decent clothing (in contrast to his frayed rags), a proper chaperone, and suitable quarters the next morning. He was halfway out the door, still in a condition of pronounced preoccupation, when he appended another pragmatic question as an afterthought.
"Something tells me you will be needing some supper, eh?"
The tow-headed child nodded enthusiastically. "Yessir! I'm choobazzi hungry!"
"Bant." Ben To delegated the task with one distracted hand gesture, and disappeared in a curt swirl of robes.
Being compassionate to a fault, Bant bypassed the nutrition specialist droid station adjacent to the medward and made a special trip to the lower level refectory to fetch her charge his first meal in the Temple.
Upon re-entering the lift tube to the foundation level, she nearly dropped her overladen tray. Only a swiftly extended hand and a subtle nudge of the Force on her unexpected companion's part averted disaster.
"Obi!" the Mon Cal exclaimed, when balance had been restored. She practically bounced in place, unable to wrap arms about her long-lost friend due to the burden occupying both hands. "Oh, Obi…!" Nor was it possible to ball both webbed fists upon her hips, so she settled for a scowl. "It didn't go well."
The young Knight released a slow breath.
Bant's mouth puckered as the lift slowed to a halt. "They … they didn't punish you, did they?"
Defensive humor gently parried the unwelcome query. "Bread and water for the rest of my mortal days," Obi-Wan quipped, the faintest dregs of a smile appearing about the corners of his eyes, twitching one corner of his mouth upward before dissipating into melancholy once more.
The doors slid open, bursting their ephemeral bubble of privacy. Bant sighed, and bustled out ahead of her friend, leading the way deep into the healers' realm. MD-40 shied away down a side corridor at the sight of Obi-Wan; the subject of its aversion raised a caustic brow in the fleeing droid's direction as they passed. He followed forlornly on Bant's heels, not particularly caring where his feet led him – until he was startled out of his introspective abstraction by a gangly bundle of oversized medward tunics and unruly blond hair.
"Mister Obi-Wan sir! That took forever."
He grimaced, wryly. "Yes, it did."
The boy vibrated with pent-up energy. "This place is pretty wizard. There's like a million machines and stuff. Things I've never seen before and the droids are totally rugged! And can we maybe go back to that hangar? 'Cause I'd really like to look around there some more, maybe up close at some of the ships? And do I have to wear this stuff? It's scratchy."
Bant pointed to the single plastoid chair in the examination room's corner. He sank obediently into place, grateful for Anakin's unceasing prattle. It spared him the trouble of supporting any civil conversation, after all.
"Whoa! All this food is for me!" Having thus expressed his overweening thankfulness, the boy set to with a will, demolishing the contents of the various bowls and plates with an admirable lack of fastidiousness or selective appetite. Unfortunately, the brief hiatus in his wonderstruck monologue afforded Bant the opening she needed.
"You're exhausted," she chided, shoving a bio-sign probe into his ear canal without permission. "…And you're running a fever! I knew it."
"Then why the intrusive diagnostics?" he wondered, sotto voce.
The apprentice healer smacked him in the back of the head. "Grumpy. Proves my point. I'm reporting to Master Li."
"You do that," he darkly commended as she slipped back into the corridor to summon reinforcements.
Anakin, who had observed the entire exchange with wide eyes and a full mouth, managed to swallow down his last enormous bite. "You guys remind me of me and Kitster, " he observed, merrily. Then, without warning, his mood plummeted into misery. "I miss Kitster," he impulsively confessed. His shoulders slumped beneath the too-large folds of his shirt. "I.. I wonder if I'll ever see him again…. Or Mom."
"It is natural to miss those we have left behind." The words were out his mouth fleeter than thought, outstripping his prudence in their desire to salve an aching wound – though whether it were his own or the boy's he could not say. "But it is not good to dwell upon such feelings."
Anakin twisted his mouth to one side. "How come?"
Because the pain cuts deep, and the Dark is hungry. "Suppose you were to walk forward along a path with your head turned over one shoulder toward the place from which you came. Because you missed it so much."
The boy nodded.
"What do you suppose would happen to you?"
A shrug. "You would never forget?"
"You would walk face first into a wall," Obi-Wan corrected him, tartly.
Anakin blinked, then stared. Timidly, a bloom of shared humor peeked from beneath the snowdrifts, the white sand-drifts of grief, of uncertainty, uniting them in a tentative and sly grin. The Force gusted gently, impalpably smoothing the jagged footprints left by the recent past, a bright wind clearing a wide path ahead.
The present moment brusquely reasserted itself in the person of Master Li. "What's this?" the harried senior healer quipped, entering unannounced. "The prodigal son returns."
"Master." Since he was already hunched over in the uncomfortable chair, allowing his weary head to droop another notch downward seemed close enough to a bow for present circumstances.
"Anakin," Bant suggested, with more command than request in her tone, " Why don't you come with me? We'll find you a place to sleep tonight, and I'll show you where the 'fresher is."
Their feet pattered a soft counterpoint down the corridor outside.
"Enough posturing," Ben To snipped. He crouched before his visitor, spreading one bony hand across a furrowed brow. "I felt you the moment I stepped aboard that shuttle earlier. Don't proffer any of your wretched excuses, now."
"I need to see Qui-Gon. And Garen. And Feld," Obi-Wan insisted, blearlly. "And Zhoa."
The healer's assessing touch moved to a pulse point, then to the solar chakra. "They are resting comfortably, and I won't have you disturbing them at this star-forsaken hour… have you any idea how late it is?"
A shake of the head; the young Knight slumped further forward, elbows resting on knees.
Ben To sighed throatily as he stood. "Did the Council leave a single inch of your hide intact?"
Another shake of the head, and a bitter snort.
The healer's gnarled fingers settled lightly upon his shoulder, kneading at taut muscle. "You've brought me two impossibilities in one day… I suppose I should thank you for forcibly broadening my horizons. At my age, that doesn't occur with great regularity anymore."
"…I come to serve," came the predictably insouciant, if somewhat hoarse, retort.
"As do I," Ben To murmured, hand splayed on the younger man's back. "And I suggest that you accept my particular service in this moment. You are spent, and a new day brings its own beginning."
"I won't inconvenience you, Master –"
"You will sleep in my office. I've a cot there. Come , come, come – Up. I've much to do; don't waste my time quibbling and haggling with me. Surrender now and I'll make you tea in the morning."
The baldly proposed incentive evoked a half-smile. "Out-negotiated," Obi-Wan muttered, heaving himself back onto his feet.
Ben To chuckled in triumph as he shepherded his captive down the hall, toward the humblest of beds and what simple refuge the Force might provide in its deep and dreamless embrace.
Several levels beneath the Temple's modern foundation, buried within a catacomb hewn of ink-veined granite, another of the Order's revered elders gazed upon a quite different embodiment of the younger generation with dispassionate acuity.
But here there was no rest.
The young Zabrak warrior paced the confines of his cell – the tomb like enclosure surrounded on all sides, floor to ceiling, by that same smothering void which seeped like tarry ooze from the very stone itself – and raged. His cauterized arm's stump, presently encased in a biostasis cuff in anticipation of a prosthetic implant, banged frantically against the impermeable walls of his prison. His horned head rolled side to side in an agony far more than the physical pain any of his injuries might produce. His crooked teeth gnashed together; perspiration slicked his luridly pattered chest and shoulders, bare where his initial panicked thrashings had clawed the battle-scorched garments from his very body.
Even a minion of Darkness might go mad when deprived of the Force itself. Though this one, Yan Dooku idly surmised, was more than likely half-mad already. Certainly the paroxysm of rage here displayed for his benefit was a thing long in the fermenting, decanted in this time and place but of slow and scrupulous making.
The creature was a work of art. And that disturbed him greatly.
For to torment and twist another sentient – a gifted one, a child born to Light but kept cunningly obscured from its influence – to such depravity took the skill of a master artisan, one who was no mere servant of evil but its veritable author and creator. Just as one might infer the existence of a sculptor from the bronzium busts lining the Archives central aisle, or the talent of an architect from the Temple's soaring spires and graceful colonnades, this acolyte bespoke the genius of the one who had made him. He was one of the stunted trees of the Kiir'xuu , twisted and frustrated and pruned into a fantastic shape impossible to attain through the mere vicissitudes of nature and fortune. He was a thing forged, hammered and bent and tested in fire until its raw elements, its native potency, had been tempered to the finest edge.
Not unlike a Jedi. One was a blade of light, this other the curved knife of treason.
But both were the fruit of long labor, of teaching. Each was the living legacy of its master.
He stroked his short silver beard with one elegant hand, mind wandering the forgotten halls of history, the strife fretted eons upon which this very Temple rested as a monument upon a battlefield long become cemetery. The ghosts of the primordial vendetta had long since cased to haunt the Order's upper reaches, its unshadowed arcades and classrooms, its gardens and meditation towers. But here, among the roots of time, he stood and gazed at an obscenity beyond description, a fact beyond rational dispute.
The Sith were extinct – but here before him prowled and ranted the very resurrection of the dead.
