Rex frowns when Kix emerges from the medical tent and shakes his head. Evening is falling over Jakku—soon enough their encampment will start their night duties, but Rex's primary task for the past two hours was to stand guard outside the medical tent. That the task was self-appointed is rather beside the point, as General Kenobi might say.
"Nothing?" he asks his vod, dismayed.
"There's nothing physically wrong with him that I didn't already know about." Kix glances back at the tent. "I think it's jetii stuff, sir. All the instruments were screwy. Did Count Dooku try anything obvious?"
He pauses. "Define obvious, soldier. Jetii stuff is tricky."
"Like... hand-waving, holding up objects of power, talking about his master plan..."
"I don't think there were any artifacts this time, but it's hard to remember. Getting thrown against the wall will do that to you." At the admission, Kix gets a pinched look on his face. Rex quickly steps back, recognizing that expression from a thousand different battlefields. "Let's make sure our commander isn't going to keel over before we take care of my injuries. It's nothing significant—I remember that Dooku showed off his shiny new hands before it all went to kark. Seems like hand-waving and jetii stuff if you consider the other yahoos the General's been up against."
"You're not getting out of treatment," Kix informs him, like he's talking about the weather and not a sustained invasive medical patdown. "I've done what I can to ensure the steadiness of his vitals, but when I say screwy instruments, I mean the scanner he put together very nearly exploded in my hands. I won't be able to see the full extent of any internal damage from the impact of the fall until Sparky's got a moment to fix it, but he shouldn't be in any immediate danger."
Rex nods. At this point, the Skywalker Protocol is a law unto itself: the General will knock himself out, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Just make sure he can bounce back. "We'll wait the night out. Monitor him. If he doesn't get up on his own by morning, I'll execute Plan B."
"Good luck with that, boss. Now come in so I can check on how bad your concussion is." With that, Kix turns and heads back into the tent, clearly expecting Rex to follow. Instead, he hesitates at the flap and looks out past the camp at Jakku's sand dunes, cast in tones of orange and red and gold by the setting sun.
Fulcrum won't be happy if she's needed, he admits to himself, and for one moment lets his lips thin. But this plan has to work out. There has to be a place for us vod after the war, too.
A dream, winding through forgotten hyperlanes that were once chartered by humble merchants looking for a new home in a time before the Rakatan Empire took root in the galaxy and changed history forever:
The ruined palace she finds herself in is built out of warm-toned imported quarry meteorite from a small planet near Bothawui, punctuated by natively-hewn facades of blue-green stones larger than a man's head, stretching high up into fathomless ceilings built in an age before durocrete or technological innovations that rendered structural integrity a nonfactor on planets with weaker gravity wells.
Her breath comes in crystalline puffs and she knows without looking that the land mass outside the walls is a snowy, inhospitable, broken waste, howling with the legacy of loss and forlorn isolation, the kind of place you only go if you're looking to hide something. Or hide from something.
Lana glides toward the throne at the end of the hall, at once conscious of and helpless to stop the inexorable pull she feels toward it. It is gilded with stardust-infused Toruvian gemsteel, wrought by long-dead artisans who were once sought across every known star system, and its back is fashioned in the shape of the planet's two moons. Every crater and crevice present in the twin heralds of Kalevala's night has been painstakingly outlined in silver, perfect replicas of imperfect planetoids, one moon encircling the other in a representation of their mismatched orbits.
"This is where I was happy," a woman's voice says from behind her, strong and clear. Just like every time this happens, Lana draws in an involuntary breath. It's like waiting to be struck across the face, she thinks, a sort of breathless familiarity with the moment before the end. "This is where I loved him."
In the back of her mind, the fledgling connection to a source she only half-remembers sings in harmony with the minor-key melody threaded into the very bones of this place. If she weren't caught in her silence, transfixed by the throne she knows hides several blasters and a travel-sized medkit within its chest cavity, she likes to believe that she would summon up the willpower to close up the already-tenuous valve connecting her to the now, to the galaxy outside her mind. It has no place here.
"You're gone. Let me be," Lana says for the first time, closing her eyes as the world stutters to a stop about her.
There is a silence—an interruption of the song, an unsatisfactory halt, an abrupt rest in the middle of a low note.
"No." The voice is tender and compassionate. "I am not gone from you. Not never. I will not leave you, Lana Viszka Ruhr."
Lana whirls to face the intruder with a glare, but the palace folds in on itself like sheets of shattered glass in the span of a moment; all she catches before she opens her eyes is a blur of blonde and the smallest smile on pale lips.
New. Different. A more direct approach.
The Force must think she doesn't get the point. If it thinks at all—if it isn't just a nebulous energy field connecting the universe together, strung up at every star in the galaxy with woven threads of light that coalesce into a wall, a wall that goes on forever at the end of all things—
Stop, she tells herself, and for the most part, she succeeds.
Alone in the crew's quarters aboard the discreet Linear-class transport corvette, with the thermostat set to a sane temperature and the blankets pooled around her legs, she stares at the darkened ceiling in unsettled silence.
What are you doing to me? she asks the Force, too aware of the way it hums within arm's length, the way it rests even in the turning of machinery beneath the floorboards and fills up every empty space. It sings to her. She shies away, turning her back to the room, curling up against the wall. If Master Yoda were here, he would scold her for it. But he isn't, and she thinks she might be on the edge of panic as she finishes the thought: What are you turning me into?
On Coruscant, where it had been dimmed and muted by the sheer volume of noise, the Force had been playing in the background instead of blaring in her face like it is at present. She had been able to ignore the discomfort of being constantly aware of everything around her. Somewhere between childhood and adolescence, she had forgotten those early, desolate years off-planet, where she had never had to ask after anyone's location or intentions—the Force had simply presented it to her, handed it over unwrapped, blunt truth staring a little girl who had never been ready for it in the face.
But now, with the passage of the years, with the struggle of accessing it only as the Jedi taught her to, the way it floods through her feels almost like the strike across the face she'd been waiting for earlier.
Master Jinn, if you have an explanation for this, I would be truly appreciative, she casts out with hope, and receives no response. Always only ever the Force, humming with the haunting melody of hyperspace in motion. It is nearer to her than it has been in years, staying even when she makes a half-hearted swipe to draw it too close to her and perhaps see it push away from her once again in response.
Lana presses her hands over her ears, screws her eyes shut, and loosens her hold on the Force. It will not be pushed and it will not be pulled—but perhaps it can be ignored. "Emotion, yet peace," she murmurs, just for the sake of hearing something else in the room. "Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity..."
They arrive at Theed in the middle of the night, and Lana watches the warm glow of the city lights meander past the transparisteel viewport with a sobriety that has Obi-Wan giving her a furtive glance as he guides their ship to the public landing platform the sleepy-sounding space traffic control had directed them toward. The quiet is broken by the beeping of her datapad as it reconnects to the HoloNet.
"That's strange," Lana mutters, pulling it out of her cloak. The backlit screen bathes her face in a rapidly pulsing red light—some kind of notification, if he had to guess. Her lips thin. "Not that I doubted you, Master Kenobi, but Darth Maul is definitely on-planet. The holos are from a settlement on the west side of the biggest mountain range. Does he always look that angry?"
"Probably angrier." He—doesn't hesitate, exactly, but he isn't exactly out of touch with Intel, and he knows the kinds of holos Lana seems to have a ready pool of at any given moment are far less common on the HoloNet than a casual user of it would think. "Where are you finding all these images?"
She shrugs. Once again he finds it a jerky, awkward motion, like in any other circumstance she'd be using her bony elbows as weapons. "I rigged this datapad to trawl HoloNet boards and news outlets and compile the information together. It puts all the holos at the top of each report, for the sake of expedience."
Wait.
What?
"That tiny datapad?" Obi-Wan asks as he curves the ship around a tall spire stretching out from a large building. The concept itself isn't terribly exceptional, though he is very curious as to why Lana decided she needed to have that kind of information feed. What currently demands more of his attention is this: she programmed it herself. "Wouldn't something of that scale require a heavy-duty processor?"
Surprise flickers through her signature, then a strange sense of something he can't quite get a handle on. Embarrassment? No, that doesn't seem quite right. She shifts in her seat and picks at the flight straps. "You'd think so," she says, "but it's amazing what you can do with some insomnia and access to the Sentinel astromech lab."
"You don't have access to the Sentinel astromech lab," he informs her. He'd know—Master Yoda had given him access to her full profile in the data records, including the list of doors she has access to, and none of the technician labs that the Temple houses are on that list. It had only been after their jaunt through the Chancellor's apartments that he'd begun to suspect that she was a menace to any and all technical restrictions that anyone attempted to place on her.
Her preference for Makashi in dueling had surprised him at first. She already moves through life like she's a ghost, walking in some waking dream she's never quite gotten ahold of—but that belies the sharp mind behind her demeanor. In light of what he knows now, there almost couldn't be a better choice.
"I don't," she agrees. There's a smug note in her voice. She fiddles with her too-long Padawan braid, then flicks it back over her shoulder.
Very carefully, Obi-Wan does not sigh. "I trust I do not need to remind you again, Padawan, that a Jedi's finest virtue is humility."
"Donthon Tetha says it is anonymity." The response is sharp, immediate, and very, very sly.
"We know Donthon Tetha's name," he returns, because two can play at this game, and he is the more skilled competitor. "As well as very nearly the entire body of his work, of which there are vast quantities. I think it is safe to say that it was certainly not his highest virtue."
Lana stamps a booted foot on the floor. It makes a loud clack sound; she glances at it for a moment and carefully tucks it underneath her instead. "Curses. I've been foiled again."
All she's going to get in response to that is a dry, censuring look, and as he turns back to the flight controls he realizes it is the same look Anakin earned every five minutes when he was between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.
Truly, this is my lot in life, he thinks, for a brief moment meeting his own eyes in his reflection on the viewport.
A moment to breathe, then a return to business. He keeps his attention on their descent, absently working his jaw to pop his ears as they undergo the final landing patterns. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a strange tension tugs at him. Nothing seems to be wrong, but even so, what if? Manufacturers these days aren't always picky about the materials they use, and improperly-purified selenium has a tendency to blow out instruments if you so much as bump them. Even astromechs can't fix melted selenium alloys.
Thank you for that knowledge, Anakin.
He checks the ship diagnostics twice before he is forced to admit that nothing is wrong. Lana glances at him, bemused, but doesn't comment.
Obi-Wan exhales the air from his lungs slowly. He isn't using a breathing exercise. He's just—breathing. Slowly. And with purpose.
For once in his life, the landing is uneventful.
Only when he sits back and glance out the viewport does he realize that they've docked in the very same platform that the then Queen Amidala's royal starcruiser had landed on nearly fifteen years ago, bearing a ragtag band of misfits out to break a planetary blockade because of one girl's stubbornness.
He's already braced himself for the memory by the time it hits, and so it feels less like being punched in the gut and more like being slapped in the face.
How young he had been, that Padawan Kenobi, a man in his prime without a single sign of the beard he would one day carefully cultivate to hide that youthful jawline. He had been the one to initiate the age-old exchange between them: I sense that there is something else here at work in all this. Something—elusive.
Keep your mind on the present moment, Padawan, in the here and now. In his memory Qui-Gon's eyes are crinkled with age and a pride he had never understood, colored blue-grey by the soft overheads of the starcruiser.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Obi-Wan held him in his arms as he died under the floor of the Nubian royal palace, desperate for a promise he had already received without asking for it.
"So this is Theed." Lana's remark is a shade away from neutral, but her eyes flicker in his direction before she is suddenly examining the skyline as she stands from her seat and stretches. "It's very... different. From anywhere I've been before."
"I'd imagine so. There isn't anywhere near as much greenery on Coruscant, much less outside the walls of Sundari," Obi-Wan returns, standing and gesturing for her to leave the cockpit. His joints crack as he does so.
I'm getting old, he thinks ruefully as Lana lets out an amused little snort at his misfortune and pads her way out of the cramped room. And I am still beset by the very same issue that plagued me as a young man.
Truly, it is time that makes fools of us all.