The torture finally ended when Sidious was alerted to his apprentice having woken and reacted violently to the bacta tank immersion. He appeared rather irritated at the interruption, but ended the session, parting with a, "Remember, you are welcome to join me, any time you want," before pacing out with terse instructions to the guard at the door to "Take the prisoner back to its cell."
To his surprise, there was only the two of them there. Obi-Wan could hear it in their footsteps, though he stayed kneeling on the floor, and kept his face expressionless. He did not want to tip anyone off.
He heard the quiet clatter of plastisteel armour drawing close, then a sigh. Forcing himself to remain unresponsive, his eyes remained on the floor as he felt rough hands go under his armpits and heave him to his feet.
At the very edge of his sight, he thought he identified Ammo and Greg, but he was not positive. He had not known these particular clones for long – barely a day, if he only counted the time he had talked to them.
It had been harder, in a way, to continue the motions after the venom had started to wear off. Indeed, a slightly childish part of his brain had considered, several times, switching without warning to the Jedi code – but he had not. He felt rather dirty, having knelt at the Sith master's feet and recited the Sith code, a feeling that had intensified after the control had faded and he had had to force himself to go through with the motions.
The feeling of dirtiness did not come entirely from that, though. There was no shower, sonic or otherwise, in the cell he had been given. There was a toilet, and some anti-bacterial gel, and of course the ledge, but no facilities he could use to wash himself. He had not been given a change of clothes either, and was still in the now rather grimy thin prison shirt and trousers. He had, thankfully, been allowed to keep his boots. It was ridiculous to be attached to an object, even without starting on what the Code – the Jedi code – would have to say on the matter, but they were the only material thing he still had of the Jedi Order. They were a material possession, and he would leave them behind if necessary, but he liked those boots. Quite apart from their sentimental value, they were good, sturdy footwear.
He was prodded into the hallway, and was preparing to attack and incapacitate the two – they may be nice enough beings, but they were enemy soldiers standing between him and freedom – when he felt a metal cylinder be passed into his hand.
It was a lightsaber.
What in the galaxy…?
His confusion did not stop him from acting, and in one smooth movement the lightsaber was activated, swept through both of their blasters and came to rest at one's – Ammo's – throat. It was, he noted with some resignation, red, but it was a lightsaber.
Neither Clone looked at all surprised. The barrels of the blasters clattered to the floor, followed shortly by the now useless handgrips.
He could have killed them. Letting a Jedi escape on their watch would be met with severe punishment by the Empire, even if Sidious was apparently unconcerned – his parting words indicated that he suspected something was up. The logical follow up thought, that Sidious had realised or even just suspected the venom had worn off and had been enjoying himself watching Obi-Wan pretend that it had not, did not particularly bear thinking about. Neither did the realisation that Sidious felt that even after escaping, he would come back of his own will.
"Why?" Ammo and Greg exchanged looks, and then Greg's eyes met his, full of pain. "We were soldiers in the Clone Wars. We remember what it was to be fighting for freedom." He bowed his head. "Anchor spoke out, a bit. Just in the privacy of the barracks, but then when Vader got hungry, he went for him. Vader always goes for the ones who speak, who dare to think for themselves. You're a Jedi, and we remember what - what that means." His voice broke, just a little, and Ammo gave him a sympathetic look before he met Obi-Wan's gaze and said steadily;
"There were younglings in the Temple."
Younglings. Babies. Healers, teachers, the infirm, the crippled in body, the old.
"I know." His own voice was surprisingly steady, but then it had taken many long hours of meditation before he had been able to think of the Temple without smelling the smoke and the ozone of blaster shots and lightsabers, without seeing the bodies he had passed as he ran into the Temple, towards the bright lights, dimed with fear, that were rapidly being extinguished and the Dark, almost overwhelming signature that he instinctively knew was cutting them down, only to arrive too late. The younglings, and they could not have been more than eight years old, most of them, though there had been a couple of teenage Padawans who looked to have fallen in an attempt to protect them, had been lying strewn across the floor, and in the mist of it all a dark figure, and then the Sith had turned to face him and he had recognised his Padawan…
They had fought that day. They had fought long and hard, in the midst of the Temple's ruins, feet slipping on blood and stumbling to avoid stepping on any of the bodies. He had lost, though he had survived by fleeing, after only a last millisecond deflection had turned a limb-sheering blow into a deep, agonising burn down his leg. Bacta had healed it enough to prevent infection, but he had had a limited amount, and the scarring remained. He had been lucky not to actually lose a limb; Force knew Master Yoda had not been so fortunate in his later attempt to remove Sidious from power, and had only survived the wounds courtesy, Obi-Wan had found out later, of Bail Organa.
"They didn't deserve to die like that." Greg's voice was almost a whisper.
"Don't leave us alive. Please." Ammo was looking at him, his gaze as steady as his voice had been. Obi-Wan understood the sentiment. He had seen the state Padme had been in after her rescue from an Imperial torture facility where she had been held for sneaking her children to safety, away from Sidious and her husband.
There had been no way to save her from the poison in her bloodstream. She would have died a long and painful death, completely unaware of her surroundings and that she was now among friends, had the decision not been made with heavy hearts to end her suffering.
He would not leave these two – honourable beings, in their own ways, despite their circumstances – to suffer a similar fate.
He nodded. A moment later, their heads thumped to the ground.
The place was eerily quiet, and though Obi-Wan had no way of knowing what the normal level of traffic was, he suspected it was more than this. He had pulled the hood of the robe up, over his face, and kept the deactivated lightsaber in hand. The few people that had crossed his path – minor officials of some sort, if he had to guess – had had pasted very unconvincing not-terrified looks on their faces (or not bothering, letting out a squeak and breaking into a run back the way he came, in one case) and hurried past, very deliberately not looking at him, so he supposed the disguise was working.
The building, which he supposed must be the lower levels of the Imperial Palace, had an astonishing variety of functions. From the offices of the minor officials he had passed, to the cell blocks he had come from, to a surgical rom he slipped into to "borrow" in order to scan for the chip preventing him from accessing the Force, and then cut it out. He gritted his teeth as he wrapped the cut – too messy for a surgical cut, but he did not want to wait the time it too for an anaesthetic to spread through his system, even if he did know how exactly the were preventing him from using the Force.
Given that it did not return immediately after he pulled the chip out, slick with blood in fingers that were only not shaking from the pain through sheer willpower, it was some sort of compressed drug that was slowly released into his system, and he became very glad he had chosen to forgo the painkiller. Some Force suppression drugs reacted extremely badly to them.
He wrapped his leg – and no wonder he had not been able to locate the chip through touch alone, hidden as it had been beneath the scar tissue – in bacta and bandages, and took some more that he placed in a sealed plastic bag which then went into one of the pockets of the robe. Then, he limped out, leaving the chip behind. As useful as Force suppression drugs could be if he found a way to get them out of the compressed container, the possibility of there being a tracking device included made it not worth the risk.
The Force started to return to him sometime later in his trek – and how big was this place? – just a little, and he dared not slip into meditation and get speed up the metabolising of the drugs, and it gave him nudges in the right directions until, some hours after he had left Ammo and Greg's cooling bodies in the hall after closing their eyes and dragging them out of the way, he reached the exit.
The noise of Coruscant reached him, and it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
His appearance, coupled with the most Force persuasion he could muster, let him pass out into the sunlight. And once he was out of sight of the doorway, he stopped in the blind spot between some of the security cams, pulled back the hood, and just breathed as he enjoyed the feel of the sunshine warming his face.
A.N. I think there will be one more chapter after this, or maybe an epilogue of sorts. Regardless, this story is reaching an end. Thank you all for your support – and could you perhaps give you opinion on, say, whether Sidious knew that the venom was wearing off and kept repeating the order just to torture Obi-Wan? Much appreciated.
Grey
