K'gworth slammed a cupboard door in the Carmine Pantry and opened another. "Glowrods, glowrods, now where in the names of all gods are the glowrods?" He slammed that door shut as well.
"Looking for these?" Looma held a glowrod in each hand. A small glow headlamp was positioned in the middle of his forehead.
"Give me that!" K'gworth grabbed one out of Looma's hand. "How do you always find them so fast?"
Looma shrugged. "I think of them and then they appear."
K'gworth rolled his eyes. "Never mind, what matters most is that we have them. Let's go." He marched out of the Pantry. When he realized that Looma was not at his heels, he turned. "Well? What's keeping you?"
Looma shifted his weight from side to side, his gaze focused on the mosaic pattern in the floor tile. "I really did think, this boy, 'e was the one."
K'gworth's gaze softened. "Yes, well, you weren't the only one who hoped things might be different this time. But no doubt she's found him by now. Come along. And bring the shovel."
"The shovel? Moi?" Looma hurried to catch up.
K'gworth drowned out the litany of complaints coming from behind him. He marched to the imposing front door and, throwing all his weight into it, managed to wrench it open-
-only to drop the glowrod at his feet. It shattered, sharp pieces flying everywhere, but he didn't notice. He stared at the man outlined in the open doorway.
"You?" he croaked. "But…" His gaze fell to the bundle of dark cloth and pale limbs clasped to the man's chest. "Mistress?" he gasped. "Is she…but how…I don't understand…"
"Get out of the way!" Looma instructed, and K'gworth felt himself being tugged backward on feet that no longer obeyed him.
This wasn't possible. Nothing defeated the Mistress. Nothing.
Well, except HIM. But they hadn't received a transmission from HIM since the Boy's arrival.
"She needs help," the Boy said, and he pushed past K'gworth and Looma. His strides were long and hurried as he headed for the main staircase and the bedrooms above.
K'gworth glanced at Looma. The Gaulian's gaze was as stunned as his own. But a small smile played at the corners of Looma's mouth. "So it seems that things, they are different this time after all, no?"
"But she's obviously incapacitated, you nitwit! That's different all right, but it's not good! What happens to us if she dies without fulfilling the prophecy?" K'gworth finally got his legs to work and he ran after the Boy.
Looma was hot on his heels, his smile wiped clean.
Luke climbed the stairs as fast as he could, using the Force to keep the woman cradled against him free from jostling. She still lived. He could see the slow rise and fall of her chest. But her eyes remained tightly closed and she remained limp in his arms.
He ran down the hallway to his bedroom, not knowing where else to go. From behind him, he heard K'gworth's heavy footsteps struggling to keep up with him. "The North Tower!" K'gworth gasped. "She must go to the North Tower!"
Luke didn't deign to stop or turn around. "I am not putting her in that hellish shambles of a room," he said, his throat tight. He reached the bedroom assigned to him and gently lowered his arms, placing his bundle on the bed stomach first so as not to further inflame the wounds on her back.
Her face was tuned to him. It was so, so white, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose standing out in vivid relief. Luke's heart clenched. He knew she was responsible for terrible, terrible deeds, deeds for which she must answer. Yet she saved him out in the forest, when she could have left him to die. Why, he did not know.
But now it was his turn to try and save her life.
"She lives?" K'gworth asked, a tremor in his voice.
"Yes," Luke answered. "But she's badly hurt. The Alpha jumped her." He sat down beside her and began to remove her boots, moving as slowly as he could so as not to harm her further. "We need hot water, bandages. Any bacta you might have." He wished he had paid further attention to Aunt Beru when she spoke about medicines. On the other hand, knowing how to care for a third degree sunburn or how to heal skin flayed by a Category Five sandstorm wasn't going to be much use now in any case.
K'gworth nodded and left the room, running. Luke returned to the girl on the bed. With the hood off, her hair spread around her like a cloud at sunset, shining red-gold in the light of the room's lamp. He undid the fastener of her cloak, drew it away from her slender neck. But how to best remove her garments without injuring her further?
"Here, let me," a soft, high-pitched voice said at Luke's elbow. Luke turned and almost fell off the bed when he saw who was there.
"Pottz! You're…you're…not…you're not…" he stammered.
Pottz cocked her head, her purple and pink tresses falling into her eyes. "I'm not what, Boy?"
"Dead," he said simply. He blinked his eyes several times. She was still there.
"Well, of course I'm not! That would be ridiculous," she said briskly. "Now, help me with her clothes. Poor mistress," she crooned to the girl on the bed, tenderly lifting one arm, then the other, free from the massive black cloak.
"But…but…I saw you," Luke said. "In the North Tower. You were…in pieces."
Pottz stopped her ministrations to look at him. "Snooping, were you? That's not very wise, Boy. Or polite."
"Luke," he said, his irritation rising. It was one thing when Han called him "Kid," and that had its limits, too. It was another to have these strange people make him feel like he was ten years old, teased for having no parents, excluded from the others' jokes and games.
Pottz retuned to her task. "Have it your way," she said. "Snooping is not very wise. Or luke."
"No," he said with a short laugh, shaking his head. "Luke is my name. Not 'Boy.'"
Pottz tsked. "But you are a boy, are you not? We need a boy. The prophecy won't work otherwise."
Luke shook his head again, this time in confusion. "I'm male, yes, but my name is Lu—" He stopped, his breath caught by the sight before him.
Pottz had managed to remove the girl's garments from her upper back. He could see now the multiple deep slashes caused by the Alpha's claws, red and raw and crusted with blood both old and new. But she had other scars. Dozens of them. Some silvered with age, others still pink and recent.
"What happened…" His voice trailed off. He couldn't imagine what – or who - could have created them. Or how much pain was suffered in their inflection.
Pottz caught his gaze. "Yes, she's had worse. We just need to make sure the poison from the claws doesn't spread." She looked behind him and her face lit up. "Ah! Here comes K'gworth with the water and the bacta."
"Wait. Poison?" Why did he always feel like he was five steps behind and three days late in this castle? And- "I saw you in pieces. How can you be alive?"
Pottz took the hot water from K'gworth and sent him away for more. "What a silly question," she said, dipping a cloth into the basin. "Here," and she handed the cloth to Luke, "clean her wounds. Careful, now."
Luke did as he was bid, wincing as he wiped the blood away and saw the damage that lay underneath. The lacerations left by the Alpha's claws were horrifying enough, but the skin around them was beginning to turn a deep, angry scarlet. Pottz looked over his shoulder and tsked. "Not good. Well, we'll just have to see and wait." She applied bacta patches to the cleaned areas.
The Beast stirred. "Shhh," Luke soothed automatically, dabbing carefully with his cloth. The bumps of her spine and the sharp bones of her shoulders were clearly visible beneath the fair but scarred skin.
A soft whimper came from her lips. His hand moved of its volition to stroke red-gold hair off her damp forehead. With her strange, eerie yellow eyes hidden behind closed eyelids, she really was quite pretty, he thought. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full and pink, her chin a bit long but pleasingly pointed. The smattering of freckles across her nose only emphasized her complexion's smooth perfection.
She was just a girl, really. A slight, delicately built girl.
But she was also one of Palpatine's Beast, the rational part of his brain reminded him. The gimer stick shards shimmered in his memory.
He tore his gaze away from her face and continued to bathe the grisly gashes on her back.
She moved again, causing him to jerk his hand away, and uttered a low moan.
"Mistress?" Pottz darted to the Beast's side and knelt down so that she would be on eye level with the injured woman.
A yellow eye opened then, just a crack. "Pottz?" the Beast whispered. "You…okay?"
Pottz smiled at her. "Right as rain. Looma found the last missing part in an old supply box."
A ghost of smile passed over the Beast's face, turning into a grimace. "Good for Looma…" Her eye closed again.
Pottz put the last of the bacta patches on. "There now. Sleep, Mistress." She looked up at Luke. "All that's left now is time."
"That's all we've ever had," K'gworth said from the shadowy corner where he had taken up sentinel duty. "Time. We used to have too much. Now I fear we don't have enough."
Luke's patience was at an end. Enough with the cryptic speeches. How could Pottz be alive? And why was the Beast so scarred? And why did they keep calling him "boy?"
He turned to Pottz. She blurred before his eyes. He blinked again, and she came back into focus. "I want some answers," he said, only it came out as, "I want shome anschewers."
Pottz glanced at K'gworth with a raised eyebrow. K'gworth shrugged. "He told Looma he wasn't a sot, but I have my suspicions."
"Not a schmot!" Luke insisted. Although the room was whirling around him. On the other hand, he hadn't any alcohol since that bottle of Whyren's Reserve Han snuck into the pilot barracks on Hoth, so he doubted that was the root of the problem. He sat down on the floor next to the bed and put his head in his hands, hoping that would stop the room from tilting further.
"Boy?" Luke blinked up as Looma entered the room. Or at least Luke thought it was Looma. It was hard to tell, what with the three heads and six arms.
"I 'ave made up a new room for you—" Looma stopped, and turned to the others. "Sacre bleu!" he exclaimed. "Did you not see 'e was also wounded?"
Wounded, Luke thought, his brain running thick and sludge-like. Yes, that's right, a smaller canine got him, too. In the worry over the Beast, he'd almost completely forgotten. But now he could feel the burning pain radiating down his back, creeping through his nerves, seeping into his veins.
Poison, Pottz had said earlier.
Great.
He closed his eyes. The room stopped spinning.
And blackness swallowed him.