Disclaimer: There were these two OCs named Dack and Dev, and they were mine. Even though they really belonged to the Jawas. But everything else, it was George's.
Introducing the Hapless Trader™!
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7. The Gauntlet Falls
A hydrospanner clattered to the deck and knocked aside several empty glasses that had once contained water and muja juice. Several seconds later, Devona Swyfte's head popped out of an overhead hatch, her dark braid dangling into the empty space above the corridor. "Hey, Arden? Could you get that?"
There was no response. Devona sighed, dropped down from the hatch, and picked up the hydrospanner herself. "Is it that much to ask for a little help? I'm carting you around for next to nothing, the least you could do is…oh, what's the use?"
She stopped her complaints, shoved the tool into her belt, and gathered up the empty glasses. There was no use in asking an ancient Teräs Käsi master to help fix a hyperdrive; Arden would probably try to use her freakish powers and short-circuit the entire thing.
Again.
You'd think someone with several thousand years of experience would pick up some mechanical know-how along the way… or maybe she just does it to make me scream. Sometimes, Devona firmly believed that Arden did things purely to chuckle at the chaos she could cause.
The Wanderer's maintenance corridor had become something of a storage yard over the last few months, and as she stumbled through it she vowed once again to clean the damned place up – at her earliest convenience.
She deposited the glasses in the galley and wiped off her hands on a rag. "Arden, I'm going to need to pick up a new converter before we..." She spotted the woman standing in the bridge, likely either meditating or thinking about jumping through the windows. Devona hedged her bet on the latter; Arden had been nothing but odd for the last day or so, going back and forth through the Wanderer's living quarters and complaining about disturbances in the greater powers.
Whatever that means, Devona usually thought. Arden might be very powerful indeed, but that didn't mean she wasn't just plain odd.
In truth, Devona Swyfte couldn't decide which group spooked her more: the Jedi, or the old-school Teräs Käsi warriors. They all fell into the general category of Force-users, most of whom served as chilling reminders of what happened when one had an abnormally large number of weird little creatures swimming through one's bloodstream.
"I'm going to shop around for a converter," she said as she puttered about near the back of the bridge. "And then I think I might sell myself at the Outlander."
Arden did not respond.
Devona rolled her eyes and brushed past her, leaning over a keyboard to check the readouts. "Life is much easier when no one listens to you, isn't it? In fact..." She glanced up, fully expecting to see the sparkling lights of Coruscant when she looked out the windows.
Instead, she realized that Arden wasn't meditating. She was staring.
Slowly, Devona followed Arden's gaze to the plumes of smoke rising in the distance. Orange flame leaped up from one of the tallest buildings on Coruscant, swathing everything around it in a reddish-brown glow. Fire? Here? There shouldn't be fires on Coruscant. Much less from a building of that size.
And then it occurred to her.
Devona dropped her datapad, hardly noticing as it bounced off her foot. "Isn't that the--"
"Yes."
"But aren't the--"
"Yes."
She grasped at the chair, her eyes widening. "Holy mother of--"
Fire. The Jedi Temple was on fire.
Devona grabbed for the general broadcaster to dial in the local brigade. Arden immediately slapped her hand aside. "No. Wait."
The pilot gave her an incredulous look. "Are you out of your mind? It's--!"
"It's just on the top level," Arden said calmly. "Notice the lack of fire drones."
Devona continued to gape. "It probably just started!"
"It's been going like that for half an hour. The Sith have made their move, and I do believe the big one is much higher up than any of us thought." Arden turned around sharply and strode off the bridge, the bewildered pilot hot on her heels. "Don't scramble, Devona, it's not dignified."
"The Sith? Wait -- you watched it for half an hour?" Following the long-striding woman proved to require a great deal more dexterity than Devona had imagined as she navigated the cluttered hall of her starship. "We have to do something!"
She imagined Arden's eyebrows lifting as she walked. "We?"
Devona tripped over a storage box and banged her hand against a sensor panel. "You can't just do nothing!"
"I can and I will." Arden reached the common room and pulled her bracers out of a cabinet, strapping them to her wrists. "The Jedi claim to be warriors; let them get out of it."
"They're philosophers! Peacekeepers!" Devona followed the other woman as she made for the main hatchway. "This is a direct attack on the--"
"You're spending far too much time with them if you're talking like them." Arden called a jacket to her hand and slung it on, tugging nearly-black hair out from under the collar. She palmed the hatchway, and the ash-tinged air of Coruscant filtered in.
"Arden!"
Arden Lyn stopped short and spun around, grasping the startled Devona by the shoulders and hauling her close. "If we go there, we'll be overwhelmed. Far larger forces are at work than you or I, and please, Swyfte, believe in my exceptionally long-lived experience when I say we shouldn't run into the burning building."
But the Jedi... The words died on her lips as Arden jumped right out of the ship and off the landing pad, effectively barring further discussion. Devona Swyfte stood there, staring at the chilly evening just outside the hatch, nearly pinching herself to make sure she was awake.
Surreal, she thought, shutting the hatch. Absolutely surreal. How did I get stuck carting her around?
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Anakin Skywalker possessed a swift turn of foot and reaction time that had long-ago earmarked him as one of the Order's best swordsmen. Cin Drallig, while always critical of Anakin's faults, had freely admitted this upon the young man's knighting several months prior.
How he wished he'd been wrong.
He knocked Anakin aside with a sharp jerk of his hand and drove him from the arena to the balcony. Something had exploded on the landing below, and fire still reached up into the night sky, turning everything in sight a fierce shade of orange-red.
Smoke stung Cin's nostrils, and he attacked Skywalker with renewed vigor, relishing the startled look on the boy's face. "You burn my temple, you kill my students, do you really expect anything less?" Cin weaved toward him, hammering at Skywalker with his blade. "I taught you how to fight, you spiteful little wretch."
Skywalker threw the Force into his strikes, raining them down on the shorter man. "You were a horrible instructor."
Cin landed a punch across the boy's cheekbone, and then reached back to Force-shove him away. Skywalker stumbled back, but did not go down. "No, you were just a horrible student. Your treachery ends here!"
With a growl - a growl! - Skywalker spun around, his lightsaber arcing sharply downward. Cin leaped aside and delivered a stabbing double-swing, and then shoved him again. This time, Skywalker barely even registered the blow. "You're weak, old man."
The innermost reaches of Cin Drallig's mind knew that the fight was already lost; Skywalker's unnatural darkness all but assured it. He'd slaughtered half the temple and seemed to have drawn his strength from those deaths, sucking the Force from one body to the next in a never-ending quest for power. Cin drew upon all his old defenses, and the two figures clashed at one another over and over again, backlit by the raging fires that crept ever closer to the heart of the temple.
The fire made Skywalker's face look bloody and raw: fitting; he is stained with the blood of Jedi. But there was no time to think, no time to feel anything as Cin dodged blows and tried to force the boy backward over the railing.
Skywalker always just managed to evade the death blow with his name on it. His strikes never wavered in their strength, and he railed away on his old instructor until it was all Cin could do to defend himself.
Cin didn't even realize he was retreating until the light from the fire dimmed, and he was once again in the dueling room.
"You won't get past me," he said, wishing for a younger man's bravado.
Skywalker reached back with his blade and swung hard enough to send Cin flying backward into one of the holocrons. "As I said: weak."
Never give in to the Dark, the holocron advised. Once, Cin might have chuckled dryly at the irony.
The swordsman accepted that he was losing and did his best to smile cheerfully at his opponent. "I'm weak, you're stupid; we can't all be perfect."
Cin dropped into a crouch and swiped at elegant black boots, then sprang back to eye level with an uppercut. Skywalker's eyes, usually a fairly benign blue, stared back at him in shades of gold and red as he pushed back with his blade. Sparks danced around their locked sabers, both men refusing to give an inch.
Cin knew what the outcome would be. It was written in the Force as plainly as the red in Skywalker's eyes or the crumpled figure of Serra on the floor. I am losing… I've already lost. But I will not die at his whim.
"There's something you ought to know, Skywalker," Cin murmured over their crossed blades, pleased that the boy leaned forward slightly to catch his words. "You call me old? Jedi age, Darth Whoever-You-Are. Sith Lords rot."
Cin waited for the insult to register, and then headbutted him.
Skywalker snarled and hurled him straight across the room. Cin slammed into a wall and dropped his lightsaber, gasping as the air simply escaped from his lungs. He rolled to the side, crawling over Serra's body and sending her still face an apologetic look.
Skywalker advanced on him, weapon raised overhead for a final strike. Cin's grip tightened on his own 'saber. I'll take you with me, you little…
"Master Drallig! Run!" The shriek was female, and young. Cin looked up in astonishment as Bene hurled herself at Skywalker, blue blade slicing frantically at his cloak. "I got through the troopers on this level, Master, go!"
For just an instant, victory seemed vaguely possible as he watched little Bene's poor form -- poor form more than made up for by the vigor in her attack. She'd gotten through all the clones on this level? If they could dispatch the traitor, they might yet make it!
But Skywalker's hand closed around Bene's neck, even as she sliced at him. Cin leaped to his feet and charged at them both, calling his blade back to his hand. Skywalker effortlessly blocked Cin's strikes one-handed, shaking Bene and tightening his fingers around her throat until all that emerged was a rasping, terrible croak.
Cin felt the slice of plasma against his arm and staggered back. Bene's croak echoed in his mind even as her struggles ceased, and Skywalker dropped her still body to the ground. I was supposed to protect the younglings… Mace told me to protect them…
"Don't worry, Cin," Skywalker drawled, "you'll soon be joining them... as will your other padawan."
Cin tried to sneer through the pain in his arm. "You would not put a scratch on Joclad Danva."
"I didn't have to." Skywalker held out his hand, and Cin hurtled directly into it. Fingers closed around his neck, and a lightsaber spun in the Sith's free hand. "The clones did it for me, while he was en route to the Redeemer."
Cin stared at him, unable - unwilling - to believe the obvious. His padawan... both his padawans... gone?
And then Anakin Skywalker, that damnable brat from Tatooine, ran him through.