SWEET CHILD OF MINE
~
The Guest
His guest was not running, not in immediate danger. Possibly wounded, bleeding, but the pulse was strong enough. Human… a female, at that. Wonderful. But, stretching out with his mind, Judas checked the webs he wove and saturated within the various statues and stones of the four gates and their arcades, and the grand atrium within: yes, they were all still working their sub-conscious magic, whispering as it were in the ears of all and perceived as their own. No, this was no Jedi nor Sith nor anything else of that nature: any sort of Force-sensitive, upon detection of the webs, would, out of reflecx, inspect them –look at them, become aware of them, and might even try to see what they were and how they worked. Not that such webs could be easily undone. But Judas was also certain that this girl (for such was the hormonic mix of her blood, detected as she touched the core of one of the spiral staircases climbing up from the grand atrium to the second floor) was no vagrant nor prostitue: being his traps against such were still in place, the Sanctum was the last place within the ever-increasing radius of his influence that such creatures would want to be.
So he made his way off the stage, out of the auditoreum, through several passages, a corridor or two, down a fine double-helix staircase, then a low-ceilinged hall, before reaching the lowest locked door in the entire tower. Her slow march made for an arrival only seconds after his: concentrating, Judas' increased perception of sound heard the softest of paddings, as gentle feet came to a halt; a dainty hand pulled the door, and found it locked; a sweetly pathetic sigh, like that of a kitten, could be heard on the other side of twelve inches of oak. Judas inserted his ring, pulled out, and waved open the massive door.
She wasn't yet twelve.
Wearing greasy rags, tar-blackened and bloodied hands were not yet calloused or rough; dirty arms were young, and looked sadly as if she was just playing in the rain and would soon be fresh from a hot shower. Her new breasts were heaving up and down (for such was the consequence of various technologies used in the "modern" beef and poultry industry), occasionally choking from soot and smoke and smog and airborne grime: maybe TB, maybe not, but those lungs were new to the street. Everything about her body, from that torn skirt to her ruined dress and jacket run through with rocks and stains, from her hair saturated with mud and tennisshoes buried with it, was horridly dirty, horribly stained (seeming) beyond all repair. For in her eyes there was no doubt that she would never be clean again: everything so marred, but everything also so new. Even those eyes. That fragile face, the newly adolescent frame of her face, the still girlish nose, those intense eyebrows, that proud forehead, her noble chin, those womanly, untouchable lips –and eyes, oh how he would never could never no man ought to never no man could ever deserve and no man dare ever lie to those azure eyes, just as blue and just as sad as his own soul.
But she went in rags, while he was arrayed as a prince.
And yet those eyes held him. For once Judas had forgot himself, lost in those eyes, just as suredly as they were lost in his, admiring his fine clothes, thinking it a kindly though dark stranger to go about in his monochrome sort of way and with that vain ring. But shelter, and warmth, and water, and food, and a bath were the priorities of her mind enchased within that head of country-butter blonde.
Judas could not remember when last any man held his gaze; Master Windu avoided his primordially penetrating gaze evening last, for he knew what Judas had become, or at least, his was a warped perception of a marked change; no Monk had ever dared, save the Inquisitor who only attempted once, before his brains leaked from nose, eyes, ears, and hole in skull; not even his poor dear padawan, little Peter, so brave. When he was a young philosoph, before he had seen the things he had seen, when he was a young man, They had dared. But loneliness had followed him from beyond the grave: everyone thought him marred, unholy, somehow tainted, other from the world of Light, a grey warrior among the holy soldiers of heaven. How ironic was the poetry of Hell. He was despised and disdained not because of some special magic emenating from those violet doe-eyes, but by the magi that he had crafted by the adamantine machine of his own Reason. Not by the Mind Blast, nor Psychic Hammer itself: the Force be damned, his was real magic. The magic of a prophet.
But it was to her the eyes of salvation.
"Help," came the whisper from an exhausted kitten.
His mouth had hung open, his eyes had been wide with slanted brows the vision of pity, and the beginning of a father's love. But now those eyes flashed, the mouth hardened, and the great machines of his powerful mind were set in vengeful motion, questing to right the wrongs felt by his equally sensitive perception, the capstone of all philosophy.
Sweeping her off her feet with a long, muscled arm, Judas' concentration was twenty different places at once: first, the droids, to get a bath ready, hot water (but not too hot!); and food, prepare a vast dinner for the lady, first served in the Sanctum since its building: meats, vegetables, fresh fruits, cakes, milk, water, juice, break open the stores and light the burners! You, there, find some evening clothes suitable for the lady: five and a half feet, a hundred ten pounds, slim build, uh, mm, prepubescent for the most part yes just go –but every word, just as every thought was calm and still, utterly, entirely controlled: when volumne was needed it was employed and the command spelled out with utmost panache. Storms of Force-ful energies stewed in his mind as if great boilers had been fired to summon a controlled firestorm: he connected to her mind, feeding her physical pain to himself, and with his great experience and skill thus utterly controlling and eliminating it from existence, for them both. He fed her comfort not by games of the mind and subconscious, but the old fashoined way: a man whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a woman. Judas remembered old techniques of endurance and pain-control in his run up through ten stories of his stone sanctuary; by the time he arrived at her bath his own heartbeat had never been above 85, and hers had lowered to the high 50s, as if the nameless guest was asleep. Attempting to sit her on the commode, Judas saw just that: between her native exhaustion, the rejuvenating heat and his overzealous application of pain-control ("messing with my mind" she would say later), the lady was indeed asleep, and now he was faced with a rather awkward situation. With the mind of a doctor in the ER Judas stripped away what was once her clothes but had since become an amalgamation of mud and asphalt and cloth and even skin, hurling them as far away from them both as possible, winching for her on more than one occasion; he lay her upon the soft blue carpet of his wide bathroom, testing the water with a hand and about to add a touch more cold water he stopped: she was human, of warmer flesh and thinner blood than he. Her host checked the water level in the bath approximating for displacement; satisfied, he gingerly, ever so gently, with one arm under her naked, crusted knees and the other beneath her proud shoulders, he let her head doze in the crook of his arm. "Precious kitten, what have they done to you?" he whispered into her ear, lowering that wounded, prone form into warm water.
And now he was given a strenuous trial: should he just let her sit, dirty as she was, and awake soaked to the bone but yet not at all clean? What kind of host would give his guest, so helpless, a bath that didn't cleanse? And the droids could be counted on to break bones… on the other hand, what if she awoke to an utterly unknown man washing every inch of her physical body –surely that, if nothing else in this world, would be enough to frighten an adolescent into terror. Real terror. With a spell to her mind to, in a word, stay asleep, Judas did just as he intended: clean every single inch of her body, with real soap, and real shampoo, not the lesser nerve agents they sold as popular at stores downtown.
He was as precise as a surgeon, gentle as a dove, but puzzled as Watson without Holmes. After cleaning her body and wounds (and there were many), he carried her to what served as a sort of infirmary: just where he kept his medicines and did any chemistry he had the inclination to try. Judas took a sample and started a skin graft growing in a protein bath, while dressing the patch of missing skin that was her right knee. He sewed up the holes rent in her side, and back, and the six-inch incision made seeming by a pair of scissors in her thigh. His conclusion as to the nature of this last wound, Judas centered himself, then waved those two fingers over her body from head to toe: no shrapnel, no infestation, no bugs, no chips no needles no tacks no nail no screws nothing at all of that nature within her nubile body: he had gotten out all the shards of metal and glass from deep within her feet and toes and lower legs in the bathroom. But her heart…
It was a humming metal pump.
Small wonder why her pulse was so strong when she was so weary and had lost so much blood; Judas would have readily bandaged her if he had just seen the wounds beforehand! But the mud had worked to close them, and she had survived to find his door; now cleaned, they had to be addressed, and she would be on antibiotics for a good long while: he ought not use his abilities to fight this battle for her, for he could not defend her every second of every hour of every day for the next month against infection. But perhaps Judas could teach her himself.
"But I'm retired" a small part of himself cried, before those two violet eyes turned to see the sleeping face of his guest, so serious, but so peaceful. Something flashed across his face, and that voice died.
