Chapter 33
Bitter Rain

He didn't cry. That seemed to bother the other Jedi that he didn't cry. But they didn't understand. If he cried, if he let himself, he wouldn't be able to stop. He simply couldn't afford to do that. Not now. Not here. So he didn't cry.

The very next day the Separatists returned to Jabiim in full force. A fleet of ships encircled the planet, pinning the Republic forces on the ground and cutting them off from all help. The only ship that got through the blockade was a supply vessel that arrived at roughly the same time as the invading Separatist fleet. Since then there had been no contact with the outside galaxy.

On that ship, aside from some much needed supplies, were some reinforcements. There were a few fresh squads of clone troopers, of course, but there was also a very unique group of Jedi. They were Padawans, all senior-level, and all Orphans.

When they arrived the Master in charge of the campaign hadn't known what to do with them. They were Padawans and yet they had no Masters. Who would command them? Who would lead them? Who could?

In the end, Vader somehow ended up with that responsibility. Despite his condition, they couldn't send him away, so they'd try to put him to work. He was just like them now, and he was the oldest, so command fell to him.

The youngest had been fifteen. The oldest was eighteen. They were a diverse mixture of species, but all were connected through suffering. The war had permanently severed them from their Masters and it had hardened them. If there hadn't been such a dire need for their services, they'd probably have been kept at the Temple. But the war ground on and, ready for action again or not, they were here.

He frightened them. They were hardened by war and deep loss. Death and the Separatist droids that dealt it brought them no anxiety. But he frightened them.

His eyes were cold, they said. Cold like the depths of the void. Hard like compressed diamonds. Sharp like razor thread wire. Jagged like shattered transparisteel. Hollow and unfeeling.

But they didn't know cold. Not then. Not yet. Not until a week after they arrived. Not until the first of them died.

The youngest, a human girl, was the first to fall. During a counter-attack a laser blast slipped past her blade and burned through her throat. She didn't last long enough to realize what had hit her.

A clone trooper brought her back. All the Jedi had already known she was gone, they'd felt her death. But seeing her pale, limp, and caked in thick grayish mud was still a shock to most of them. Her friends among the Orphans mourned her. Vader just grew colder.

The battle two more of the Orphans fell. A Rodian and a Twi'lek. They'd been leading a wave of troopers when they detected a land mine two seconds too late. When the smoke cleared there hadn't been much of them left. Their friends mourned them. Vader stood for hours out in the rain.

The battle after that another Orphan failed to return. A Zabrak Padawan was almost blown in half by a thermal detonator. The worst part was he didn't die immediately. He lingered on for a few hours. Clinging to life as his friend clung on to him. But it hadn't been enough. The remaining Orphans had cried. Vader disappeared for an hour, returning with a few fresh scuff marks on the knuckles of his skeletal prosthetic.

And the battle after that, a particularly nasty Separatist strike brought down the last three Orphans. That one massive attack also happened to take out most of the remaining Jedi and halved what was left of their clone troops. If any of the four remaining Jedi Knights had noticed that Vader had been especially vicious in destroying the battle droids that he faced around that time, they made no comment on it.

Not that their opinions would've mattered all that much in the long run. The very next day, they died too. And Vader was the last 'Jedi' on Jabiim…

It was raining again. No surprise there. Jabiim had two main seasons. The rainy season, and the very rainy season. It was the very rainy season now.

Sheets of icy cold rain swept over the crater-pocked open fields and turned the trenches into shallow streams. The greenery that had once covered the land and kept the near constant rains from washing away the topsoil was long gone, all torn up and seared away by war. There was nothing but thick, gray, sticky mud for as far as the eye could see.

Down in the soggy trenches the remaining clone troopers stood at the ready. With each succeeding battle, their numbers dwindled further and at this point there were barely enough to defend this last position. Actually, there weren't enough soldiers left to defend this place. The rest of those present in the trenches were volunteers, native Jabiimites.

It was a strange breed of people that could live on such a damp, muddy planet. The natives were fiercely independent and long accustomed to taking care of themselves. But they'd lacked the strength to repel the Separatists alone and the Republic, finally remembering that they even existed, had offered the help they needed.

Beneath the planet's muddy exterior was a vast wealth of mineral resources. The Separatists wanted those resources to build more droids, ships, and weapons. The Republic would like the resources too, but would settle for just keeping them out of Separatist hands. The Jabiimites just wanted to stay free and independent. They knew the Separatists wouldn't let them remain that way if they won, so they'd thrown their lot in with the Republic.

Now that the Republic forces were cut off and failing, the Jabiimites, feeling desperate, were sending volunteers to the front. Though untrained, they certainly had the determination needed to stare down the endless waves of mindless battle droids that marched on the trenches. They would hold their world at all costs, even their own lives.

Vader respected that. Part of the reason that there was a clone army was that ordinary beings, the average members of the Republic, didn't want to risk their own lives or the lives of their children in war. They didn't see the clones as real people, they were just copies bred and trained solely for the war that now raged.

The Jabiimites were different. They were willing to spend their own lives, not just the lives of clones of a stranger. They were willing to pay the price for freedom themselves instead of sitting back and demanding that others do it for them.

Vader passed a few of the volunteers as he slowly paced the line. They nodded to him in terse greeting as he approached him, and shuddered with more than damp cold as he passed them. He frightened them too, like he'd frightened the Orphans. But they also understood why he was so cold, or felt that they did. And they respected him.

A cold wet gust of wind smacked him in the face though he barely felt it. It didn't even slow his pace as he slogged through the swampy trench. The sensation of being dry and clean was now just a distant memory.

Jabiim would fall. It wasn't a question of if anymore, just a question of when. Everyone knew it. Vader knew they knew it. He could feel it in the sodden atmosphere. So long as the Separatist blockade held, the rainy world was doomed.

Most of the southern hemisphere had fallen to the Separatists. What was left was mainly defended by local defense forces and resistance fighters. They wouldn't last much longer. And then there was his force, which guarded the planetary capital.

Perhaps his troops would last longer than the rest. Perhaps they wouldn't. Vader didn't know, nor did he have the energy left to care.

All his remaining strength was directed to keeping his focus locked tightly on the here-and-now, on the task at hand. He would do his duty; he would follow his orders to defend Jabiim until he could no longer physically do so. He would fight until the Separatists until they trampled him down into the mud, into the blood, and into the bitter rain-soaked fields of Jabiim.

And when he died, he would die free. He wouldn't die a slave. He wouldn't die a servant to Darkness. He would die on his own terms. He would die doing something good, right. He would die free.

Vader paused mid-step, spun on his heel, and strode double-time back to the middle of the line. The Force whispered him warnings that he couldn't so much understand as feel. They were coming again.

At the center of the line of trenches was the make-shift field command center. As the only Jedi left, it was his duty to be there and command. No suicide charges for him. Not until the very end.

He arrived just as the preliminary reports came in. He listened as the clone commanders fired off their shaky figures of enemy troop strengths and movements. He considered it for a few moments, then gave his orders. As his orders were relayed down the line, he turned to face the direction of the oncoming enemy wave and waited.

Darkness was the ultimate temptation. It offered a quick simple solution. Instant results with less effort. Always it called, speaking louder in times of stress. And when the temptation is yielded to, when the Darkness is tapped, it overwhelms.

The sense of power, of strength and invincibility, is limitless. Better than alcohol, better than spice, better than sex. Nothing can top the high that Darkness brings. And after that first touch, that first taste, it's so much harder to not touch it again.

Vader knew it all too well. It called to him now. A siren call, whispering of destruction, power, and revenge. It could be some much easier if he just gave in, used it just this one more time. After all, there were no more Jedi left, no one to know if he drew on the Darkness or not. He could get away with it. He could.

It coiled around him. Almost touching him. Whispering, promising, offering. He almost listened, almost reached out to seize it, but 'almost' was as far as it went. Instead of accepting it, drawing it into himself and using it, he pressed it away.

Then the time for waiting was over. The fabled 'calm before the storm' shattered under the slogging feet of row upon row of marching battle droids. And the last of the Republic forces crouched in the mud, ready to meet them.

The missiles and thermal detonators came first. Most fell short or fell far, leaving steaming craters where they exploded. A few fell just right to land in the deep narrow trenches, leaving carnage in their wakes. Clones and Jabiimites screamed and died, but the line held.

The droid army drew closer, the simpler Trade Federation models drew their blaster rifles from the slots on their backs, the more advanced Techno Union models merely raised their right arms. Vader let them come. He waited for an agonizing five minutes before he stopped letting them come.

At the critical moment, Vader gave the signal and his line finally bared its' teeth. The troopers and volunteers rose up from their sheltered positions and opened fire. Vader unhooked his saber and waited.

Holes appeared in the front lines of both sides as droids fell on the march and clones and Jabiimites fell in the trenches. The Republic line held. The Separatist line kept advancing. Vader watched, waited, and listened with his ears and with his mind.

What he saw, heard, and sensed, he did not like. The tide of the battle was clear, and it was against them. There were simply too many droids and too few of them. If they held here, spent themselves entirely on this spot, they would make no appreciable gain for their sacrifice.

If they were going to be annihilated, Vader wanted them to take as many of these bastards as possible along with them, and they couldn't do that here. So they would go somewhere where they could do that. Vader tightened his grip on his saber and shouted the order to withdraw towards the city.

The trenches exploded as the last remnants of the Republic Army on Jabiim surged up and out. A third of them stood and provided cover fire while the other two thirds made a mad dash over the three miles to the fringes of the capital. Most of those who stayed to provide cover never made it more than five steps away from the lip of the trench they'd jumped out of.

Vader ran in the middle of the pack, neither at the leading edge of the retreat, nor at the trailing edge by the trenches. He tried to keep the troops in some loose form of order, but as they ran more and more fell due to exhaustion, injury, and death. Halfway to the city he was all but alone, only a small squad of clones remained close enough for him to effectively command.

A wave of vulture droids swarmed in, raining fire in front of Vader's little group, forcing them to stop short. The clones tried to shoot the flying droids down, but their blaster rifles simply lacked the power necessary to do enough damage. Vader tried to deflect some of the vultures' blasts back at them, but their higher powered energy weapons, which were designed to break the shields on star-fighters, left his arms trembling and tingling with each jolting impact.

In minutes his forces were reduced to three clones and himself, and the squadron of vulture droids, diminished only by three, landed shifting into their terrestrial attack mode. The awkward scuttling droids scampered towards them, ready to bludgeon them to death. Vader snarled and raised his sapphire blade to cut down the enemy machinery that was charging him, when two unexpected things happened.

First the vulture droids took hits from some laser cannons that seemed to have materialized magically somewhere behind Vader. Before even half of the vultures were slagged the second thing happened. A ship's thrusters fired, again behind him, blasting rain and mud everywhere and half-blinding him.

Someone grabbed him from behind and switched off his saber before he could blink. And then he was yanked backwards and-and upwards? An incline? Solid, not squishy like mud? A…a boarding ramp to-to a ship?

Vader tripped, catching his heel on the ship's threshold, and tumbled to the floor with a damp splat. He was dragged a few feet deeper into the ship by his mystery savior (or captor?) before he was released and allowed to slump down flat onto the deck. There was a blur of movement and a…a…a Tusken Raider…?

Th-that's it! I'm hallucinating! I've kriffin' lost it! Vader violently shook his head to try and clear it and get his focus back. There was no way a Tusken Raider could be here. The primitive natives of Tatooine were violently aggressive, isolationist, xenophobic, technophobes. They never left Tatooine. Ever. Period. He had to be seeing things.

But when he opened his eyes again and looked around, the Tusken was still there! It was now hurrying down the corridor towards the ship's bridge and it paused briefly to turn around and beckon to him. Vader stared incredulously at it, slowly staggered to his feet, and then crashed straight back to the floor as the deck lurched underneath him.

Dazed and totally off-balance, Vader managed to get back on his feet a second time and make his way towards the bridge. It wasn't easy as the ship kept twisting and jerking around and his legs didn't seem to want to hold him up anymore. All the endless slogging through sticky mud followed by a two mile sprint seemed to be catching up with him. The fact that he hadn't had more than a few cat-naps in about four days probably wasn't helping much either.

When he finally did make it to the bridge, the ship had risen to the upper reaches of Jabiim's atmosphere. The Tusken Raider was still there, clinging to the back of a chair occupied by a clone. It appeared to be leaning over the clone's shoulder and reading the display screen. Vader just stared at it, unsure if he was sane or not, awake or not.

"Padawan Vader, where are the others?" A very proper, cultured-sounding voice demanded, interrupting his confused stare.

Vader whipped his head around to see Ki-Adi-Mundi, the Cerean Jedi Master Council member, staring at him. Vader blinked blankly at the alien Jedi, totally failing to grasp the meaning of the question he'd been asked. The cone-headed Cerean seemed to grow annoyed with Vader's failure to answer him.

"Where are the others?" Master Mundi asked again.

"Others?" Vader repeated blankly, his voice hoarse from all the shouting he'd had to do to be heard over the roar of battle.

"The other Jedi, where are they?" Master Mundi elaborated as if it should've been obvious.

It took a long moment for that to click in Vader's head. There must be more chaos out in the rest of the galaxy than he'd thought. The Jedi were probably aware that many of their number had died on Jabiim, but they had no clue that all of them had passed on.

"Dead," Vader croaked at last. "They're…all dead. I'm…'m the only one left."

Master Mundi frowned back at him for a minute. A flicker of suspicion flared briefly in his eyes before he turned away to call out orders to the ship's crew. It seemed they were to withdraw back to Coruscant immediately.

Vader swallowed hard and clutched at the edge of a console to keep from sinking to the deck. His legs hurt and he was so tired. His soaked, mud-caked robes weren't making things any easier. They were now ten times heavier than they were supposed to be and the drafts from the air vent over his head made him shiver. So tired…

The transport ship gave one last lurch as it transitioned into hyperspace and about the same time Vader's knees decided to stop working. But instead of hitting the deck – again – someone caught him. He twisted his head around to see the Tusken Raider – who was surprisingly solid for something that he had to be hallucinating – had caught him.

"Please come with me," the Tusken encouraged pleasantly, though it's – his – voice was muffled by his ugly mask. "You look as though you could use some dry clothes and a place to rest."

"Who are you?" Vader wondered dazedly as the Tusken half-dragged, half-carried him off the bridge.

"My name is A'Sharad Hett and I am Master Ki-Adi-Mundi's Padawan." The Tusken explained.

"Oh," Vader blinked.

"I am a human," A'Sharad continued, heading off a question he'd probably been asked a million times before by curious others, "but I grew up among the Sandpeople of Tatooine and I consider myself one of them."

"Oh," Vader blinked again, suddenly twice as uncomfortable with this odd situation as he had been before.

The last time he'd been around Tuskens, if he'd been seen he would've been attacked. Now he was being half-carried by what looked like a Tusken, but was actually a human who thought he was a Tusken. This was just…weird and…awkward.

A'Sharad brought him to a cabin and left him there while he presumably went in search of some dry clothes. Vader wearily shrugged off his sodden cloak and lazily dumped it on the floor, then sat on the edge of the bed to peel his water-logged boots off. As he pried them off, each coming loose with a wet sucking sound, he felt ever stronger waves of weariness crash into him.

His chest tightened as his raw throat grew thick. His vision grew blurry as his eyes stung. Stubbornly swallowing hard and clenching his teeth, he willed the sensations away. He couldn't afford what they signified. Not now, not yet.

Just a little longer… Just-just a little longer…