Symmetry and Imperfection

Part 3

~

Vader considered the man's head on the table in front of him and contemplated death.

Death was the great leveler. Weak or mighty, death came eventually to all. He had no particular fear of his own death; sometimes he thought that it might be a great relief.

Just not yet. There was still much to do.

The Emperor feared death; he was obsessed with finding secret of immortality, much as any asteroid belt boomer might be obsessed with finding a hot rock. Indeed, Palpatine coveted immortality as if it were another rare object that he could display as evidence of his power.

Others looked for a legacy; something to leave behind them after they had "gone." Some compiled massive fortunes, some erected complex monuments, while others sought out and accumulated knowledge or fame. All of them searched wildly for a way to keep their names and memory - and thus a small portion of their selves - alive.

In the end, it mattered very little.

Fortunes were squandered or lost. Monuments crumbled to rubble and were built over even as new regimes fed on the leavings of the old. Knowledge faded or was superseded. Fame burned out and the ashes of all were swept into anonymity.

Even as powerful as he was now, Vader knew that in a mere century he would be just a chapter in a history text. In a thousand years, he might merit a line. In ten thousand, he would be a footnote of interest only to scholars immersed in the esoteric. Not much humbled him, but the thought of the ultimate death - the death of memory - was ... disturbing, Sith philosophical considerations notwithstanding.

In the end, dead was dead, whether one was a Sith Lord or a street sweeper.

This could just as easily be the head of a street sweeper as of a Jedi Knight, death had removed all hints of personality or inclination from the features.

Vader had a vague memory of this one as someone who had passed through the Temple when he had been Padawan Skywalker all those years ago.

Ki Te Sune. Memory whispered to him in that dead man's voice.

Ki Te Sune had been called by the Council for a formal reprimand and then sent to a far outpost so that he might meditate upon his errors. It had been quite a scandal at the time.

It would appear that Ki Te Sune had made his last error, and paid high for it.

According to the post-mortem, Ki Te Sune had been alive during the serial amputations of his limbs but not for his decapitation. The head was intact, and most of the torso, though it appeared that scavengers had run off with one hand, some toes and a large amount one buttock. Official cause of death was exsanguination into the abdominal cavity.

What was even more interesting, at least to Vader, were the fading power signatures left at the site. If this had been a battle between a Light and Dark Jedi, there would be a muddle of unsettled energy. In a very short time, there would be a masking effect generated that would unsettle any Force-sensitive who walked through it.

As it was, Vader could read the signatures quite clearly, which meant only one thing: the Jedi whose remains were in front of him had been a Darksider, as was his killer.

~

Abhaia and Melenk moved in the dance of death. He was less confident now that she had laid open one cheek, and he circled with the blue blade of his saber extended in defense.

There was a time not so long ago when she had detested violence. Trained as a Healer, Abhaia knew the consequences of violence the way her tongue knew the interior of her mouth. She understood pain, sickness, and death as parts of life. They were constants, unavoidable and inexorable. Violence was something to detest and avoid, it was senseless even when puported to have a purpose. It caused suffering that a Healer was supposed to alleviate. It left gaping wounds on the souls and bodies of the survivors.

Grandmother Esabail had been struck down by her own husband; dying with a look of serenity and acceptance before her clothing fell to the ground, empty. Although Abhaia had been just past her third nameday, she remembered it as clearly as if it had happened last night. Abhaia's own mother had died under her hands twelve years later, even before she could begin to repair the broken, bleeding thing that had been Keille.

She knew entirely too well the price that violence had exacted from her. Throwing herself into her training, Abhaia had excised the thought of violence from her mind, denying it sustenance as she might starve a budding malignancy or a parasite.

She thought herself safe. Nobody noticed the dull little Healer until they needed her. Her black hair was pulled into a sensible bun, her blue eyes ever downcast, her bronzy skin untouched by cosmetics and her dress purposely nondescript. Grandfather and his men brought back stunning women, laid with them and brought them with child. Not one ever noticed her other than to register her report of another birth in the quarters.

Melenk rushed in, his blade a blur as he slashed at her head. He had given up trying to talk to her and dodge her blade at the same time and had settled for trying to get out of here alive.

Abhaia ducked, rolling to the left, around, then behind her opponent. Flicking the tip of her green blade at the back of his knee, she neatly cut the tendons and sent him crashing to the floor as he tried turn with her.

Violence that had lain dormant inside her, gathering strength, now found its outlet.

In a flurry of nicks and slashes, she cut the tendons in his other leg, his sword arm and delivered a stab just above the fourth vertebra, transecting his spinal cord. His lightsaber dropped to the ground and lay there until she picked it up and deactivated it while he lay on the ground, everything below his shoulders dead weight.

The younger man, Karris, lay on his back, ashen-faced but expressionless from the damage she had wreaked in his head.

"So. This is the Dark." Abhaia clipped Grandmother's saber to her belt and Force-flipped the old man over. "I can say that if you soulless, spineless lackeys represent the Light, then I'm Darth Vader."

"Abhaia... please..." The old man's pleadings sounded like the gobbling of a Rooter bird being trussed for the slaughter. He promised her everything, honor, prestige, fortune, even to let her go.

"There's one thing I want. Only one thing." She dragged the younger man to lie at his cohort's side. "If you can give it to me, I will heal you both and set you free."

"Name it. Whatever you want."

Desperation rolled off both men in palpable waves.

"It's really something very simple." Her voice quavered on the last word and tears rose to her eyes. "It's so simple that trillions of women do it every day with no access to the Force, no lightsabers, no real training. It's all I want, it's everything I want."

Kneeling in front of them, she held her hands out in supplication, "I want to hold my daughter again. I want to show her to my mother and grandmother and see them love her as they loved me. I want to have Mama brush my baby's hair and Gramma tell her stories. I want to wake up at home, in my bed and have them be in the kitchen, or the garden, or helping teach my little girl to be a strong, intelligent, loving woman. Can you give me that? I want a normal life."

She felt Karris gathering his power for a strike and her blue eyes blazed like a new-born sun. Turning her healing power on him, she ruptured every major vein and artery with a thought and watched as life, once so sacred to her, ended in a welter of scarlet.

Studying her handiwork, Abhaia turned back to the Melenk. Though his eyes were squeezed shut, tears ran down his face. Gently, Abhaia laid his hand on his cheek.

"Can you, oh powerful and great warrior for all that is right, make me back into the child that I was?"

No answer was forthcoming.

When she stood once more, wiping her tears on the sleeve of her tunic, there was a spreading scarlet lake on the hanger floor. Carefully searching her kills, she picked everything of value from the bodies, transferring the loot into her own belt pouch.

Pausing, she weighed the comlink in her hand. It was a locked frequency, good only for communicating with the base of origin.

She opened the channel.

"Grandfather?"

~