~

"Back off, Sith." Part of Naum protested that this was not the way of the Jedi even as he snarled at Vader.

Something that might have been a laugh issued from behind the black mask. "What do you hope to save, Jedi? Her or yourself?"

"To save even one from you"

"Even one who is already willingly apprenticed? Abhaia is Sith, I am her Master. If she was awake she would not deny this, but as we stand here the odds lengthen that she will never wake." Vader's tone was as matter-of-fact as if he told Naum that water was wet.

"Abi is a Healer, she"

"Can heal her injuries only if she retains a degree of consciousness. That dart held a drug of some sort – feel for yourself, Jedi, she is not tranquilized but anaesthetized."

Naum stretched out in the Force, calling to Abi, but found only a strange echoing emptiness. The feel of Abi was there, but there was no actual presence. The multiple injuries felt like cracks in her presence, and he could feel them draining her lifeforce away.

Drawing back, he shook his head. "You cloud my mind somehow, Sith. Deceiving, misleading"

"The only deceit you perceive is the one you cling to and the clouds in your judgement of your own devising," Vader snapped. "Look deeper, Jedi. You can see that I have no need to prevaricate when you and your kind delude yourself so ably."

Naum deactivated his saber, flinching inwardly as his fallen brother's barbed words struck spots left tender by his last exchange with the Council.

"We all have our delusions, Vader. I prefer mine to yours." Naum wished he sounded more certain.

"She dies, Jedi. Leave her with me and she will live." Vader drew his saber but did not ignite it. "Just in case your tender morality withers at the thought of leaving your 'one life', I can give you hundreds to assuage the pangs of conscience."

"Hundreds of lives? What are you going to do? Take a day off?"

"What I do brings order, while the Jedi hid in their temple like a kupi in its shell and let the Trade Federation and Separatist sympathizers run the Republic to ruin." Vader's anger was palpable. Many of those responsible for multiple atrocities had never been brought to justice. "The rebels are a new name on old treason, Jedi, and you and yours embrace those who spilled our blood at whim."

Naum's jaw tightened, but he stood quiet. There was nothing that he could say to the contrary, watching the former Separatists and their allies held up as victims of Imperial brutality made him nauseous.

Vader pulled a memory stick out from a pouch on his belt and held it up. "Has she told you much about where she's from?"

"Not much. I know only the barest of circumstances." And what he knew was horrible. The scene that he had watched play out in Jilla's would haunt him until the end of his days.

"Hundreds of lives, Jedi. Women and children, imprisoned on a world in the Illoni Cluster. You could get them out." Vader balanced the stick on the tip of his finger. "Leave Abhaia with me, and these lives are yours."

Abi stirred, moaning, and Naum stepped forward only to find himself at the point of Vader's blade.

"Or perhaps you think to obey your original orders and neutralize her? So like the Council to dress murder and assassination in such palatable terms, and so like the Jedi to point to the blood on my hands while ignoring the slaughterhouse stench of their own judgments."

"I wouldn't those orders are not the orders that I follow anymore." The words hurt, but as he said them, Naum felt himself severed from bonds that had begun to strangle him. The Force was never a nursemaid, but Naum had been raised by those who knew love, compassion and mercy. What if Master Jinn had never found him as an infant, or had found and passed him by as irrelevant?

What if he passed these lives by? What if he fought off Vader but was unable to Heal Abi? Her injuries were multiple and severe – she needed medical intervention. Vader could go to Illoni and then the people trapped there would likely look back on Jasc's rule with nostalgia, if the Sith Lord left any alive at all. But to leave Abi to Vader

The Sith might save her life, only to take her soul.

But alive, there is always a chance for her. Deadis dead.

"All you have to do is to be willing to stand here and watch her die, Jedi, and that grows closer by the second," Vader said quietly. "One life or many lives. Your decision."

~