A/N: Just to clear things up: that last chapter was an April Fool's joke. ;) Please disregard it when reading the rest of the story; Del was never really meant to be pining for an overweight droid with an image problem. Also, I don't really hate Bald as Malak for "flaming" me, no matter what my reviews page may claim to the contrary. Heh. Anyway...
Her eyes were gray.
Like a persistent insect the thought came to Sion again and again, disturbing his focus with soft moth's wing flutters of memory.
...gray as fog, or smoke, or...
...ashes swirling, falling, summer snow from a black starless sky...
Dim ghosts of half-forgotten times lingered at the corner of his eye and danced out of reach the moment he tried to view them head on. There were gaps in Sion's recollection of life before Kreia's teachings, as though a surgeon had cracked open his skull and deftly carved entire years from memory. Rage he remembered, and pain, and the hatred of weakness. The rest he was glad to let fall away.
So he told himself with increasing vehemence, but...
...warm calloused fingers against his skin...
...pale ash caught in hair black and smooth as oil, and...
...her eyes were gray...
He cast off all pretense of meditating and prowled the halls of the Treyus Academy with the directionless menace of a caged predator. One of the newer acolytes made the mistake of meeting his eyes as he passed. Sion snapped the man's spine in three places and cast him, still twitching, to the floor.
At length his pacing brought him to the projector room. He had ceased his hunt of the Exile for the time being, though only to seek answers to the questions Kreia's interference raised. Relics and records of his prey lay scattered about the room where he had left them, including the medical holo he had previously found so oddly fascinating.
Sion flicked the projector on, but this time the image failed to captivate him. He cycled rapidly through a dozen more, mostly blurry surveillance footage from backwater outposts along the Rim, then stopped on a damaged copy of the Exile's military log. Of all the information his followers had tracked down, this was the only holo in which the woman appeared whole and unscarred.
"– the maneuver was necessary to secure victory," the record of the Exile said. "I must continue to trust in his–" It skipped forward. "–future engagements, the lives of the men and women serving the Republic are given higher priority."
Sion searched backward through the log, not sure what he was looking for until the moment he found it. The earlier entries were in better condition, and the playback was smooth and clear.
"Eres III has fallen to Mandalore." She looked grim and exhausted. Her robes were singed and torn. "Revan's strategy did not take into account the true viciousness of the Mandalorians, how much they are willing destroy in the name of victory. The fires caught us off guard. The air was choked with ash, and many of the ground troops broke formation in the confusion. The citizens we could not evacuate are presumed dead." She pressed her hand to her forehead, leaving a dark, sooty print. "The xoxin fields could burn for years, even decades. An entire planet ruined at the whim of a single man . . . It is an atrocity beyond my comprehension."
The projector clicked, signaling the end of the entry, but by then Sion's thoughts were ten years and thousands of miles away.
He had borne a different name then, and a different face.
Thick black smoke blanketed the suns, creating an artificial night at the height of noon. Blinding ash rained from the skies. Mandalorians came like ghosts through the gloom, herding the panicked Republic army into groups, butchering them a hundred at a time. Soldiers lost sight of their partners only to trip over their corpses seconds later. The Mandalorians were in their element, and victory would soon be theirs.
But they were not the only hunters that could see in the dark.
Through the Force he stalked them, found the weak points in their armor, and struck them down. No longer bound by Jedi laws, he wielded his power with a vicious instinct that would have horrified those he once called teachers. He conjured lightning from nothing, crushed Mandalorian throats without ever touching them.
They disgusted him, these men who swarmed like locusts and left nothing but ruined worlds in their wake. The galaxy needed strength and guidance, not mindless slaughter . . . nor the cold death by neglect that the Jedi labeled 'peace.'
A flash of green light drew his eye.
He disentangled his sword from the ribs of his latest kill with a brutal crack and loped toward the lightsaber that seared bright arcs and figure eights into the dark. He hoped it was Revan, the arrogant Jedi whelp who had led his army into ruin at the hands of the enemy. If the young fool were to suffer an unfortunate accident, the flames would leave no trace of it behind...
His focus was his undoing. Eyes intent on picking the form of a Jedi from the swirling smoke did not catch the grenade that bit into the earth at his feet. He leaped back, not knowing why he did it until the tidal wave of dirt and shrapnel crashed against his chest.
A momentary nothingness.
He lay on his back, staring up at the face of a woman with skin the golden-brown of sunlit worlds. Her eyes were tightly closed, her dark lower lip caught between her teeth. His senses felt dulled, slowed, confined to the feeling of hands splayed flat against his chest and knees pressed into his sides, the smell of her sweat. A flake of ash spiraled lazily downward and caught in her hair. He reached up to brush it away.
"Be still," she said, and with savage tug freed a jagged shard of metal the breadth of a fist from his chest.
The shock wore off at once, giving way to a throbbing agony that wormed its way deeper with each beat of his heart. He bucked beneath the woman, scrabbling wildly at the ground, trying to twist away from the wound that pumped his lifeblood into the scorched air.
Strong hands pinned down his shoulders. Cool gray eyes bore into his own.
"Be still," she repeated. "Let me help you."
Her soft, hoarse voice was strangely calming, as was the gentle pressure of her hands on either side of the wound. Cool numbness seeped outward from her fingers into his skin. Sharp pain dulled to the sweet ache of a loose tooth. The bleeding stopped, but the gash did not quite seal over.
The woman, panting, mopped the sweat from her forehead with a blood- and ash-stained sleeve. The motion nearly overbalanced her. He caught hold of her hips to steady her and felt how she trembled with the effort to stay upright.
"You . . . used the last of your strength to heal me," he said between ragged breaths. "Why?"
"There is so much pain and death here. I needed . . ." Her chin wobbled, and he realized that behind the tired, sorrowful eyes was a very young woman not yet used to war.
The sounds of distant battle were drowned out by the sound of a landing carrier. Mandalorian reinforcements, he guessed, come to pick off the survivors. His sword lay where it had fallen near his hand. With strength born both of anger and a sudden, primal protectiveness he fought his way to a crouch, pulled the exhausted girl to his chest, and readied his sword for a final assault on the shadow figures lurking in the dark.
Then the wind shifted, and his thoughts of vengeance melted away with the smoke. Through a tangle of armored corpses walked three Republic officers, two human and one zabrak with a crown of stubby horns. Behind them came a crew of droids that bent swiftly over each body, took vital signs, and carted away the living on foldout stretchers.
"General," called the zabrak when he caught sight of the two of them. "General, is that you?"
The girl turned, and beneath the reek of ash he caught the clean scent of her hair. Slowly, he let go of her.
"Yes," she said, and "I'm perfectly all right," when one of the droids began fussing over her. The zabrak helped her to her feet and let her lean against him, and the man who would be Sion fought back a wild urge to choke the relieved smile from the alien's tattooed face.
"This man is wounded. Take him to the medbay immediately." All trace of uncertainty had left the woman's voice, and the two human soldiers fairly jumped to do her bidding. He allowed them to lift him onto a stretcher and pump a shot of kolto into his arm. The woman did not look at him again. As they carried him past her, however, a troubled line creased her brow.
"We'll meet again," she murmured into the rising wind. Her hair slipped free of its bindings and fell across her face like a shroud. "I can feel it."
Del stood slack-jawed in the doorway of the shuttle's closet-sized armory, taking the gleaming rows of grenades and larger explosives with timers, the racks of high-powered rifles and envenomed daggers. Slusk had always come off as a bit of a cheapskate, but he plainly didn't skimp on the essentials.
Wipe the drool from your chin and get moving, she reprimanded herself. It's time to get this sleek little beast planetside.
She shut the door with some reluctance and headed for the cockpit. Halfway there, she was seized with a sudden trembling weakness, like a rush of blood to the head, that brought her to her hands and knees. Flakes of something like dirty snow danced before her eyes and disappeared before they hit the ground.
She thought she saw a man pierced through the heart with a shard of ice. When she reached for him, her hands were wreathed in flames.
"Be still," she whispered, and the sound of her own voice startled her. Gradually, her vision cleared. She stood with great care.
Why can't I shake this cursed fever? Del rubbed her false eye with the heel of her hand and felt its worrisome, pulsing heat. It's actually getting worse. No wonder I'm seeing things.
But for a moment there had been a feeling of truth to the vision, a sense of connectedness and awareness she had thought forever lost . . .
Del crushed that fragile hope before it could reach full blossom. Laughing bitterly, she reached for the shuttle controls.
"Twist that any tighter and it's going to blow up in your face," said Bao-Dur.
The Czerka tech looked up from the force cage she was attempting to repair and gave him a vicious glare.
"Will you shut up?" Judging by the ugly purple her face was turning, the tech was just about ready to shut down the fields of Bao-Dur's mini-prison and go after him with her hydrospanner. "I don't know how you managed to short this thing out, but I do know that you're the reason I have to stand here all damned night repairing it."
He shrugged, feeling distinctly less than guilty. Then the tech made another graceless prod at the exposed innards of the force cage, and Bao-Dur winced. "I'm warning you, one more half-turn and that conduit will– "
"Shut UP!" A handful of screws arced toward his head and were deflected by the field.
"All right," he said genially, lacing his hands behind his head. "It's your face."
She mumbled something unsavory beneath her breath and went back to abusing the machinery.
Bao-Dur had been imprisoned long enough to know that his captors were big fans of corporal punishment. The torture field wasn't the worst pain he'd ever felt, but it was no afternoon picnic on Alderaan. He bit back any further suggestions and contented himself with watching the tech repeatedly fail to conjure anything more than a handful of sparks from the field generator.
Then the tech gave the generator a healthy smack, as though it were the haunch of a farm animal, and it sputtered reluctantly to life. She stepped back from the humming cascade of energy with a triumphant grin on her flushed (but unfortunately still whole) face.
"Ha!" She wagged one dirty finger at Bao-Dur. "You see that? I fixed it just fine without any of your stupid–"
Every light in the complex flickered and went out. The backup generator kept the detention fields glowing, and it was by their eerie light that he made out the saucer eyes of the tech.
"Not my fault," she shouted, and scurried out of the room.
Bao-Dur didn't know if she was right or wrong about the lights, and he didn't care. The only thing that mattered was that he was now alone, and provided with a nice convenient distraction to boot. He raised his cybernetic arm, clenched his teeth, and slammed it into the field.
Just like before, the force cage shorted out. Bao-Dur moved fast, pausing only to turn off the stasis field around his remote. The droid greeted him with a series of soft beeps.
"I missed you too," he told it. "But we'd better hurry. You know how quickly they caught us last time."
On his previous bid for freedom, he'd made it no more than a dozen steps out of the room before the first merc saw him. The man had been clumsy, slow in pulling his weapon, and Bao-Dur could have dropped him before he ever had the chance to take aim. He'd even started toward the merc, fists raised, ready to snap his neck like a twig, when the strength of his own desire to harm sickened him. And so he hadn't fought back, even when the merc had thumped him in the back of the skull with his blaster and dragged him back to his cell.
This time, Bao-Dur promised himself, he would fight. And if it came down to it, if the price of escape proved to be end of a sentient life, he would force himself to kill again.
The lights turned out to be the least of Czerka's problems. As he crept from the containment room, a series of explosions rocked the compound, obliterating the merc quarters. At this time of night, he would guess that more than a dozen men had just been blown apart in their beds.
Czerka must have ticked off the wrong person, he thought, quickly heading for the opposite side of the compound and ignoring the hot rush of satisfaction at the idea of his captors reduced to spare parts.
There were more explosions as he ran, and quieter bursts of blasterfire. At one point a man in Czerka uniform tore down the corridor toward him, running like death itself was on his heels. When he was no more than a few yards away, an enormous blast of energy slammed into the man's back and sent him sprawling.
Bao-Dur changed directions so quickly he bumped one of his horns on his remote, then ducked into the nearest room. Behind him, a second shot echoed, intermingled with the sound of a woman's laughter.
He'd only just had time to duck behind a wall terminal when the door slid open, revealing the dimly-lit form of a woman carrying a rifle nearly as big as she was tall. She lowered the massive weapon, peered into the room, and cleared her throat as though to speak.
Before she had the chance Bao-Dur was behind her, his flesh-and-blood arm wrapped tightly around her throat.
"I think you should put that down," he murmured. He felt her tension, how every muscle in her back was rigid against his chest. He worried he might have to hurt her to make her comply.
Then the rifle clattered to the floor. At just that moment, the lights came back on. The woman broke his hold and spun away but did not reach for her fallen weapon. She stood just out of arm's reach, unmoving, watching him and waiting.
Bao-Dur saw her eyes, how very pale they were. The color of dreams come to life.
"Assaulting a superior officer, Bao-Dur?" General Deleón smiled, a cruel white flash of teeth in a ruined face that had once been heart-breakingly lovely. "I should have you court-martialed."
A/N part 2: Yep, I'm monkeying around a bit with the timeline of some of the battles in the Mandalorian Wars. Eres III and its burniness is now one of Revan's shoddy early efforts. Sorry for any ulcers that might have induced.
Hugs 'n' kisses, all. :)