In the sky, lifeboats roamed ozone and gently pulled ejected pilots out of the sky, and it didn't matter which side of the conflict the pilot had fought. On Alliance carriers, emergency med droids treated TIE pilots with the same triage rules as the X-wing pilots. On Imperial destroyers, Y-wing pilots were shoved into secured compartments and jailed with a med droid of their own.

On the ground, troopers didn't come out from behind their chosen cover, but rifles lifted into the air to stop aiming. Rebels secure their positions in the streets, but they lowered their rifles to point at the ground. Civilians peeked from their hiding places, scrambled to retrieve the fallen and held out palms at soldiers of both sides to help wounded reach medical facilities.

Alliance ground troops managed footholds in several districts of the Coruscant surface, but they gladly stopped where they were, allowing the Empire to further secure their own hold on neighboring precincts. Chewie could easily see where the battle lines rested from his perch on the base railing of a planetary gun. The gun was silent now because its operator was on his knees in front of the Wookiee's warning crossbow, but both captor and captive looked over the nearby landscape to see the fighting was coming to an end.

Chewie ripped off the man's hat and grabbed him by the back of his hair to yank him to his feet. He marched the soldier forward down the gangway and the back stairs of the gun tower. As he looked around, Chewie called out a long, loud call.

Blue eyes scanned the fallen, the corners of buildings, the distant railings. . . .

He called out again, "Hhhhhaaaaaaaaannnnn!"

In time, he found him. Han lay in a crumpled lump amongst three others where blaster fire had rained down on them all. Chewie rushed over and rolled the Han onto his back. A furry hand grabbed the unconscious face and shook it. Chewie lifted his face to his captive and lowered the crossbow with a hooting order, then waved the man off to go free.

Chewie wrapped his crossbow to hang over his front and grabbed Han by the arm and leg to lift the man onto his back. The Imperial hesitated to bring down his hands when he realized what was happening. His eyes shifted back up the stairs to the gun, and flicked back to the Wookiee to wonder if he could make it.

Chewie adjusted the limp body on his shoulders and stared the man down. His eyes flicked the other way, telling the soldier to return to his people.

Two rebel troopers arrived at the scene and aimed their rifles, but Chewie barked at them. The Imperial watched, but Chewie flicked his eyes again. Go to your people.

Carefully, with hands raised, the Imperial stepped beyond the rebels and rushed away. Chewie adjusted Han on his shoulders once more and walked fast for the nearest medical help.

Rogue Four touched his thrusters to settle his X-wing to a stop amongst the debris. Rogan finally pulled his hands from the controls and rubbed his face under the visor, but he recovered with a cracking voice. "Rogue Four to Rogue Leader."

No answer.

Rogan sighed hard and looked around. He could see some of his team out there. The next order of business was to figure out who. "Rogue Four to Rogue Group. Muster on my position and report in." He flipped on his muster beacon and looked out the cockpit for signs of other survivors. "Does anyone have a twenty on Rogue Leader?"

One by one, X-wings cruised carefully toward him from distant clusters of capital ships and battle flak. His mind registered with increased relief as pilots reported in. Not all of them called in, but Ardor spoke over the channel with a hopeful tone that he spotted Jewie successfully eject before her ship flamed out. Seth was stuck in his dead ship without thrusters and called that he was fine to wait until a rescue boat had the chance to come get him. But no Wedge.

In loose formation, and slow enough to ensure they didn't look like they were on another attack run, the remaining X-wings of Rogue Group cruised back over to the Mon Icarus, angled themselves outside the hanger bay, and requested permission to land.

The request was declined.

Instead of seeing their repair crew on the bright-lighted deck, hauling in ejected pilots from tractor beams and waving in wands to lead them home, the hangar deck was hardly more than a gaping charred wound on the side of the carrier. A flickering shield barely contained its contents. A TIE Fighter still rested where it had splashed to bits on the deck, its polygon panels tangled with undeniable pieces of X-Wing, and all of that sat amidst scattering of army-green, flight-suited bodies.

Civilians began to emerge from their hiding places and swarmed the streets in clusters. A Togrutan shop owner led the charge towards a crash of a ship shot down during the fighting. Helping hands pulled wounded neighbors from broken bits of buildings and checked for life in the bodies still lying on the ground. Blasters warned defensively as more advanced along the skid marks in the street to the blackened lump of Lady Luck. The Togrutan climbed onto the mess and pulled away what was left of the broken cockpit window.

The rebel pilot inside was bloody and coughing. Lando tried to squint through the burns on his face, and coughed some more. Blood came to his brown lips. He panted with weakening strength and closed his eyes again.

With blaster aimed at the Rebel's face, the Togrutan merchant looked the enemy over. . . .

Then handed his blaster back to the assisting civilian behind him, and reached in with both hands to pull the pilot out of the wreckage.

The cease fire sounded clear enough over the transport's speaker, but that didn't matter because they were already hit. Their transport was supposed to be far behind the firing line for all this, but the scramble of battle had several transports moving out to the side to keep from getting pinned by the Imperial reinforcements arriving from behind.

The transport was pummeled by fire from a Star Destroyer for only a minute, but it nailed their maneuvering thrusters almost immediately. Sitting in rows of six across, packed like sardines from fore to aft, and peering wide-eyed out the tiny portholes to watch the flashing beams dash by them, support crew tightened seatbelts and gripped armrests. The ship shuddered and rocked at every hit; then, when the firing stopped, the ship continued to rattle and moan. It listed sideways as it sank into the gravity well.

At first it seemed like they were just still trying to maneuver around the debris out there, but when they fell fast passed a dead planetary shield station, the truth became obvious. New flames of uncontrolled atmo friction against the hull further insisted the reality.

They were crashing.

Joanne's black eyes looked beyond the flames of uncontrolled re-entry to watch the gem of a planet below, and thought with ironic humor about once again getting burnt in a battle.

With the decrease of the tension, so did Nik's energy. He struggled to remain awake and functional as they moved out of the Chancellor's chambers. Luke and Kess draped his arms across their shoulders as the three emerged from the lift and onto the Chancellor's private landing pad. Artoo deftly followed behind. Luke only had to warn away the Coruscant Guard with a green lightsaber to clear their way toward a covered hovercraft. They poured Nik into the backseat where Kess climbed in after him, Artoo rolled himself up to a spot in the floor space, and Luke jumped into the pilot's cockpit.

He flew up as the sun was going down, merging with other renewed traffic in the high lanes of the sky. Kess and Nik were soon staring out the windows to the destruction below. Skyscrapers were in flame from crashing ships. Troops were still on the move through surface streets. Civilians gathered in gangs to loot businesses. In the dimming sky above, capital ships looked like clusters of stars. Red and green bolts occasionally lit up in corners and in the air, but ended just as quickly. The cease fire was holding where it could.

When Kess demanded to know where they were going, but Luke admitted that he hadn't thought this far ahead. The next step in this battle was all politics, and the Jedi had to remain entirely neutral for it to work. They couldn't even appear to be favoring sides. As two decorated soldiers of the Alliance, they had a long way to walk back toward that Galactic trust of neutrality.

Soon, Luke found them a hotel on the edge of the Senate District, one that was far from high class but still offered an hourly-rental med droid for Nik. He dropped the two off on the landing strip outside and Kess did a double-take when Luke didn't get out too.

"I have to go find Vanech," Luke told her darkly.

Kess accepted it with severity and nodded. "Be safe."

"Stay with him." Luke ordered her. "All night." He pulled out the Jedi account credit chip and handed it to her. "I'll check us into the survivor list."

Again, she nodded, and hooked her elbow into Nik's to lead him into the building. Artoo whistled well wishes her as she shut the craft's door, and Luke flew away.

Nik watched it go like he still wasn't sure who that was. "Don't we need security or guards or something?"

Kess led him arm-in-arm toward the building. "We are the guards, Nik."

Upon entering the room, Kess locked them in and activated the window dimmers. She tried to usher Nik to the couch and to lay down, but he didn't. The man had recovered a large part of his alertness already though he seemed dead tired. His brown eyes scanned the room with distrust, absorbing where they were and where they just came from, and finally recognized that the nightmare was over.

Nik turned his feet to look at his sister, and wrapped his arms fully around her shoulders, burying his face in the side of her hair. Kess absorbed it gratefully, sighing with equal relief that her brother was okay, and let him hang on her like that as long as he wanted.

After a minute, Nik pulled away. His eyes still looked a little lost, but Kess activated the med droid and Nik he saw what was next. He began to unbutton the rich velvet of the dark blue tunic to bare his chest and arms for its care. They were worried most about damage to his heart from the shock treatments and kept him connected to a pulse monitor. A blood test confirmed that he still had quite a cocktail of mind-altering drugs in his system and the med droid recommended a bacta cleanse, but the hospitals with such facilities were likely flooded with people who needed it more right now. Nik tiredly asked for the risks if he didn't do that today. The med droid reported that Nik would be susceptible to suggestion for as long as it was in his system.

Kess sat sideways beside him on the couch and quipped. "It's your turn to shovel the sand out of the driveway."

Nik rolled his head on the back of the couch to peer at her. She grinned until she realized he seemed to truly question the validity of her statement. Perhaps he was a little more drugged than she thought.

"Where's Gina and Ben?"

"Dad took them to Nekisa for a couple of days to wait this out. We'll ship them here as soon as we're sure the fighting is over."

"Why can't I go to them?" The drugs had him pouting like a toddler. "I want to go home."

"We need you here." Kess tried to console him. "I'll explain it tomorrow. . . . Just rest."

Kess settled in on the couch beside him and let her brother relax. The med droid hummed to monitor his heartbeat and often reached over a tool to test his temperature and brain activity. Kess considered if she should turn on a Newsnet to see what was going on out there, but she realized her brother needed a chance to decompress. She considered calling Leia to report where they were, but opted against it. Everyone in the galaxy knew they were safe because of the vidcaps of the Senate Dome. It didn't really matter where the Jedi hid out the night.

She worried about friends and family though. She and Luke witnessed so little of the battle itself and they suffered a continued blindness of who lived and who died. The survivor list often took a lot of hours. The KIA list took days. Kess curled up in a ball on the couch beside her brother and meditated against the worry.

Luke ran with a lightsaber in his hand, but didn't ignite it. Artoo raced to keep up behind. With the cease fire still so fragile, he was prepared for blaster fire at every turn, but rarely faced it. Still, he avoided Imperial troops wherever possible, and gradually made his way on foot back across the kilometers between the Senate Dome and the Imperial Palace.

He could sense Vanech occasionally during the fight. He didn't say anything to Kess because she needed to focus on Nik's location, and now the Force pulsed with a thick blackness that Luke didn't want to tell her what was happening anymore.

He didn't recognize anything around here. The expanse of this map was so large it was severely inconvenient, if not impossible, to find the places they'd traveled when they were here for the Plan Cresh mission. He went only by the memory of Vanech's drawings, making his way nearly to the foot of the black mountain Palace before finding a lift to take him down into the underworks.

He could already smell the charred flesh in his nose, the noxious scent of death on the Force, when he stepped out of the lift just below the Palace shield level. Curling through hallways and breaking through from front to back of offices and apartments, he was already finding the sliced bodies of Imperial troops. Cops, stormtroopers, officers, pilots that never made it to their craft. Drifting further down and away from occupied structures, he began to find civilians too. Men stabbed while they were guarding their women. Arms with no bodies. Bodies with no legs. Parents still gripping children while the top half of both bodies lay grumbled on the ground beside the bottom half.

We should've left him on Yavin 4. We shouldn't've taken him to Yavin 4. We should've. . . .

We should've . . . .

But it no longer matter what they should have or should not have done. The dead were already dead.

Finally, the long trail of bodies skittered to an end in front of another broken elevator shaft.

Luke climbed down the shaft to the first opening and stepped out into the darkness of that grand open lobby of the Jedi Temple, sliced over the top by a pale blue palace shield.

Artoo hovered to his wheels behind him. His beeps echoed in the big, short chamber.

"Just keep track so we can find our way back." Luke said. He pulled a hand lamp out of his belt and started walking.

He could still feel Vanech out there, throbbing with numbness. Paralyzed by pain. The long walk made Luke wonder how to handle it, but all he could think to do was grip his hilt harder, ready to defend.

After many minutes of walking, Luke began to see an orange dot of the bud of a death stick in the blackness. His feet slowed, but he continued to approach until he could see the man in the beam of his light as well. Vanech sat against the foot of a severed Jedi statue like he had fallen against it. The little lightsaber hilt was perched on the base above his head and behind him, as if the man had ceremoniously turned it in to the stone figure of someone named Halsey.

"Don't come closer," Vanech said without looking over.

"Zach—

"Don't talk."

Luke rubbed his lips shut and kept his feet still, allowing the man to say what he needed to say.

Vanech smoked his death stick for a long, quiet minute. Then finally commented, "Evil begets evil."

Luke didn't know what to say to that. Agreeing didn't seem like it would help.

"How do you stop the cycle?" Vanech murmured.

The Jedi breathed silently, trying to think of something wise to say, and finally admitted. "I don't know."

Vanech hitched a wry grin at his answer. Ice eyes looked over and squinted into Luke's light beam. "Thank you." He said sincerely. "For trying."

Luke opened his mouth and began to step—

Vanech pulled his fist up from his lap and turned on a thermal detonator.

"Vanech, wait!"

The flashing red light and beeps grew quickly faster, indicated a short fuse setting.

"Go."

Luke tried a Pull to get it out of the man's hands, but was blocked by a black wall on the Force.

"Just go."

With widened eyes, and with the red light beeping faster and faster, Luke realized had no choice. His feet stepped backwards until he turned entirely and ran, all the while calculating if he'd had enough time to tackle Vanech instead. In the seconds, he considered turning to run back and—

Snap-BOOOM!

The force of the blow reached out horizontally in all directions, shocing Luke onto his stomach. He splayed like a swatted bug against the deck. Artoo wailed and tumbled into a little roll, resting finally against one leg on his side. Luke covered his head with his forearms, more so from the grief and failure than anything else. It wasn't a very big bomb but, in the thin wafer of space, it created a hell of a force along the decrepit temple lobby.

The loudness rang in his ears and echoed to the distance. Cracked wall panels crumbled a few moments longer. Artoo pulled himself back to his own rolling feet and queried with concern if Luke was okay. Luke pushed up from the deck and climbed to his feet.

The statue was gone. Vanech was gone. There was a hole in the floor big enough to fit his X-Wing through. And the dim blue palace shield remained a steadfast ceiling over it all.

Luke closed his eyes and stretched his neck as if to pray at the sky, but there was no sky. The reverberations of the explosion slowly echoed away to a bleak silence. It was quieter down here. Not just lacking the noises of the overwhelming city, but also—by a significant amplitude—lacking the billions of minds emitting their emotional buzz onto the Force.

Luke concentrated now to calm his own. This had been a grueling day. Although he couldn't make anyone out specifically, even down here he could still feel the distant panic and pain and sorrow reverberating through the Force. It was as if the battle itself was a bomb, and the shock and turmoil suffered by the survivors were the burning flame and sonic boom to echo away from the explosion.

Patience, he reminded himself. That horrible echo will eventually thunder itself to completion, but it was going to take days, if not weeks, perhaps months. Luke opened his eyes and looked around the blackness of this unlit cavern, remembering where he really was, and realized that some fading echoes of loss took decades.

The battles were the easy part. The long haul of recovery was the harder challenge.

But in his one stolen moment of calm and concentration, a mental scream echoed out on the Force. Another sonic boom of emotion. The anguish was incredible. The tears instant. Luke knew immediately who it was. His eyes widened in his own terror of it. He didn't bother latching his lightsaber back to his belt before turning on his feet and diving into a hard run.

It was near morning when Luke returned to the hotel and Kess sensed instantly that he was bundle of nerves. He didn't tell her what happened. His eyes said it for him. Kess had managed to get Nik to sleep on one of the beds and proceeded to administer similar care to Luke too. She led him to a chair. Numbly, he followed the order to sit down, but then he just sat there, staring at the air with dejected disbelief. Kess gently began to take off his clothes for him so he could take a shower.

With his clothes already black, she was surprised to find parts of the fabric burnt to a crisp. She ordered the med droid over to sooth his mild burns, and combed her fingers tenderly along his scalp to break out the singed hair on the back of his head.

His arms snaked around her as she did it, pulling her in to straddle his lap. His face buried in her shoulder. His every muscle was a knot. Even his face was stiff trying to hold it back. But Luke cried. He gripped her hard and shook with turbulence . . . and Luke cried.

She held him with increasing worry. She guessed Vanech was dead, and yes, Vanech was a loss, but there was more to this than that. The emotions screaming through the Force on Coruscant were bad enough than when they were here before, but now that half the planet was reeling from an immense battle, the horror and pain and anger surrounding them felt like a throbbing deep base of an impact drill.

Luke calmed after a few minutes, but he sniffed hard and raised his red face, and guided her away to let him up. Luke still didn't speak. New tears flowed down his face as he rose to his feet and shuffled over to the lav to take a shower.

They only had a few hours before they had to be back in the Senate to keep this cease fire real. Kess didn't waste time on conversation or questions. She only made sure all his clothes made into the laundry porthole before they went to bed. As the laundry rattled, and the med droid beeped Nik's pulse monitor, and the Force throbbed with continuing torment, they wrapped their bodies hard around each other and tried to meditate, tried to rest, for as long as they could.