Obi-Wan was glad that he remembered the location of the Enclave from Rahn's previous disclosure. He knew he would have been hopelessly lost otherwise. He understood why the Temple was located where it was - a closer connection to the wilderness meant a closer connection to the Living Force. He supposed he could be glad that this incident had occurred during the warmer season, which meant the days were longer.
He dreaded what he would find. He hoped that the place had truly been abandoned and that he wouldn't encounter anything like what he had seen at the Temple on Coruscant. His butchered brethren still populated his nightmares at times. Although, after four years, he supposed if he did run across any fatalities, they would have been rendered into nothing more than skeletal remains. Not that that made the task any easier.
He finally pulled up to the location and noted with some irony, that it was shaped like a rabbit's head. He should have known that the droid would have been a portent of something like this. He sighed and took out his pack as he went in through the front entrance. No electricity greeted him, and it was quiet, save for the occasional rustle of small creatures running in fright from his sudden appearance into their midst, or water plopping into puddles from several different roof leaks. He stretched out with the Force, and could feel Rahn's Force signature. It was muted, but there. He shook his head and cursed the man for his obstinacy in returning to this place.
He followed the Force signature until he came across what looked to be the heart of the Temple. It was a circular room - he was standing in front of a catwalk that led to the center of the room, where there was a circular platform. Surrounding the platform were several seats in a circular pattern, recessed into the ground. It was on one of those chairs that he found Rahn, semi-conscious and half buried under rubble. As he approached, he could see that there had been a chair at the top of the center platform, which had come loose from its moorings and displaced itself on top of Rahn.
"Decided to sit on the throne, did you?" Obi-Wan said as Rahn gave him a weak smile. He tugged out the medi-kit and ran the bioscanner over Rahn's body. "Broken ribs and a broken leg", he said clinically and then set about removing the rubble as carefully as he could so as not to injure the man any further.
"Vader. Not. Dead," the man rasped. Obi-Wan wondered if he was feverish. He had moved most of the rubble and then proceeded to give him small sips of water. So, Vader had resurfaced and the man had gone on a bender, resulting in him knocking himself off of the platform. He didn't know whether to be glad that this was just a stupid accident or strangle the man for having given several people cardiac conditions.
"No, he is not", Obi-Wan said neutrally. He did what he could to splint Rahn's leg and helped him sit up some. The man in question stank like he had been bathing in liquor, and Obi-Wan had to fight the urge to gag audibly. He hadn't really asked how Rahn had escaped Order 66 - both of them had given minimal details about their survival, but he wondered just how terrible it must have been for a Jedi Master to reduce himself to such a state.
"Bastard nearly killed me", Rahn said, eyes unfocused, staring straight ahead at nothing. "He slaughtered my padawan slowly. Cut her piece by piece trying to find me. I knew she had been in trouble - I had sent her off to hide when the clones came for us while we were hiding out on Telos. I got rid of the clones as quickly as I could and rushed back to her. By the time I got there, it was too late. She was in pieces, Kenobi, pieces."
Obi-Wan didn't want to hear anymore, he wanted it to stop, but he knew he owed it to this poor man to hear him out. His own padawan had done this to someone else's. He hadn't even begun to think about how the Coruscant Temple victims might have been lucky in that they had met a relatively quick demise. He hurt just thinking about what Vader must have done to all the poor Jedi he came across after the initial slaughter.
"The Force was still ringing with her agony, you know", Rahn said as he turned watery eyes on Obi-Wan. "That monster waited until I had arrived there and was feeling at my lowest, knowing that I had failed before he attacked. He was vicious. Luckily, I was able to escape him by jumping on a speeder that I had stolen from a clone. He ran after me on foot for a while before I finally left him in the dust. But he was fast. For something that big - he was fast." Rahn shuddered and went quiet.
Obi-Wan said nothing. He felt sick to his stomach. He almost toyed with the idea of telling Rahn about Anakin and what Obi-Wan himself had done to him at Mustafar, but he didn't think that that would be any consolation. After all, Anakin had lived, and was now inflicting the same treatment to others, with predictably fatal results. He was under no illusions that that was the first or last time that he had done something like that.
It took a long, arduous hour of starting and stopping to get Rahn out of the Enclave and back into the speeder. Obi-Wan had Rahn comm Rosa and tell her that he had been injured near a quarry due to drunken stupidity. At least this way Obi-Wan could make sure that they both had the same story to tell. He took the injured man back in silence to his home, where his worried wife came running out of the house to greet him, already having called the emergency services. She hugged Obi-Wan profusely and thanked him for being such a good friend. Obi-Wan felt like anything but that at that moment. He gave a statement to the emergency workers and then went back to his own home, wishing he had been able to finish the job he had started on Mustafar for the first time in a long time.
