Symmetry and Imperfection

Part 11

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Fear leads to anger.

Anger leads to pain.

Pain leads to suffering.

And all lead to the Dark side.

So Naum Kogan had been taught all of his life and so he firmly believed. This had been a part of the Jedi teachings for tens of thousands of years, but kneeling before a child who had been all but born into darkness, the words were pitiful and inadequate. Even the horror of what he had witnessed paled in comparison to the pain and grief that were eating her alive.

Is this how we lost Anakin Skywalker?

Naum had been heading here when the pain screamed out at him with such strength that it knocked him to his knees. Abi's signature was all through the onslaught, spurring him to stagger to his feet and run like demonspawn were chasing him.

Abi scuttled back from his touch, regarding him with suspicion and fear. Somehow, that hurt him more than anything she could have done. What were the Jedi to her if she could mistrust him so deeply? As it was, Naum counted himself lucky that she had not drawn her blade.

"What do you want?" Her voice was raw, worn from emotion. All he sensed from her was a terrible, yawning emptiness and the desire to simply make an end.

He layered his voice with all the calm and compassion that he could muster. "I want to help you. That's all, Abi."

"Why?"

He did want to help her. Every Jedi death brought the order closer to extinction. At the close of the Clone Wars, the Jedi had been at slightly more than half of their pre-war strength. In the ensuing Reunification, the Jedi lost even more precious lives. After the destruction of the Temple and the ensuing purges, the Jedi - Masters, Knights, Padawans, even the healers and farmers were estimated to number less than three thousand.

He weighed his words carefully, judging them against how she might hear them. "Because after all that I heard, after all that you have endured, to lose you to the Dark is more than I could stand. I want to take you before the Council..." he saw her stiffen and draw away, "...so that you can tell them what has happened. So that they can authorize action."

Surely the Council would act. These men who pursued Abi defiled the very concept of the Jedi of protectors of the people and guardians of peace and freedom.

Perhaps, free of them and the pain they had caused her, she might be redeemed. Thousands of years ago, the Jedi Master Niani Maenad had said that no spirit who remembered the Light could be truly lost to Darkness, that even a memory of love or care could spark and rekindle the Light within. Master Maenad was one who would have known; before her redemption, she had been a Darkside enchantress of amazing power.

For a moment the cold mask of suspicion dropped from Abi's face, leaving her looking too tired, too heartbroken and far too young.

"Do you think they will act? Really?" A glimmer of hope warmed her voice even as the next words broke under her grief. "There are so many..." She folded in on herself, reaching out a delicately-boned hand to touch a body wrapped in the crimson the she herself wore.

"They have to." Didn't they? He dismissed the question. It was not the place of a Knight to question what the Council might or might not do.

He stood carefully, watching as she pulled herself away from the body, and began to compose herself. It was a thin skim of calm over a fault zone of emotional turmoil, but it was a heroic effort nonetheless.

"I can't leave Neve like this." She met his gaze, challenging him, but to what he did not know.

"We can make arrangements for cremation of her body," Naum soothed while at the same time reminding her that the soul of her friend had become one with the Force. "We have time, I think, for that. What about the ... other one?"

Those blue eyes hardened in an instant. "Leave him to rot and if I believed in a Hell, I'd wish him to roast in it."

"It won't harm him, Abi, the anger you carry can only harm you," he said gently. "I saw how that use of the Dark side drained you. You were literally too exhausted to move."

Abi reared back like a scarlet serpent getting ready to strike and then subsided, listening to some internal alert. A harsh expression settled on her features as she looked at Naum. "We're about to have company, Jedi."

"Peace Keepers?" Naum had seen what passed for law enforcement here; he thought that the Peace Keepers ought to just call themselves Bureau for the Armed Collection of Hefty Bribes.

"Those aren't anything I'd worry about." Abi snorted and shook her head. An odd movement of her right hand sent a lightsaber into her grip, its clear green blade standing out in the dimness. "The Keepers couldn't find their own butts with both hands and a landing beacon if it weren't for the distended condition of their wallets."

Naum's own saber was in his hand, the snap-hiss of the blue blade's ignition triggering a thousand memories. "Is it Vader?"

If it was Vader, Naum resolved to knock her out and haul her away from here. Her reply sent a chill down his spine.

"No. Vader is... near, but not that near. He's listening, though. He..." Abi trailed off, eyes unfocusing and then refocusing sharply. The next breath brought words in a frightened cadence. "He knows where I am."

Naum reached out and took Abi's arm, or tried to. She stepped back and brought her saber into guard position. "Abi, I'm not going to hurt you, but believe me, whatever Vader wants will hurt you and possibly a great many more people."

"As long as it hurts the right ones," she snapped and started for one of the balconies overlooking the black sanded beach. Though this was the street level, Jilla's had been built into steep a beachside cliff.

Stunned, he followed her, reminding himself that only the Force knew what she had endured. "Abi, you can't mean that, not truly, and... what in the seven blue hells of Ignib do you think you're going?"

Abi plunged her saber into the panel that maintained a Nordicon shielding unit, meant for the safety of patrons who chose to dine in the open, then straddled the ornately molded plascrete railing.

"I'm going out the window." She spoke to him as one might to someone of exceptionally limited faculties.

Naum's jaw tightened at her tone. "I. See. That. What I wanted to know is why."

"Because the company we are about to have is my grandfather's men." Her voice carried an edge of fear and anger as she clipped her saber carefully to her belt. "Are you coming or not, Jedi?"

"Two men? We can handle that without drawing attention, Abi. Just drawing a lightsaber is enough to make some people think about collecting a bounty for a dead Jedi." Naum looked at the five-story drop from the balcony, those rocks were volcanic glass. A flicker of scarlet made him look at Abi and then duck as a pair of dueler's blades sliced the air to either side of his head.

A sigh, gurgle, and a pair of mortal thuds made Naum turn and stare in shock. Red-hair and Stocky lay on the floor, one with the hilt of a blade protruding from an eye socket, its twin buried in Red-hair's throat. He hadn't even sensed them.

"Three more less than a block away, a dozen more within minutes of landing." Abi called the blades back and wiped them on a banner before returning them to her boot-sheathes. "How good are you, Jedi?"

I'm no Mace Windu, that's for sure.

Naum dropped his robe to the ground and deactivated his saber. Swinging his legs over the railing, he pointed to a patch of sand. "I'll teach you how to do a controlled fall. It's not a true levitation, but it will keep us from being cut to strips by the obsidian."

Abi took his hand, her face intent. "Show me."

Naum marveled at the power he could feel in her, Light and Dark, each driving the other in a way that he had never felt before.

"On three, Abi. One. Two..."

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