Fighting with Monsters

Star Wars: The Bergeron Chronicles, Part 2

a fanfic by Sisiutil

Chapter 6

"OW!" Axel exclaimed as Kilu tried to clean the blaster wound on his upper right arm.

They were seated at the circular table in the Nomad's passenger lounge, which was doubling as an infirmary at the moment. Axel's shirt was off, allowing Kilu easier access to his wound. Removing his damaged jacket and shirt had been painful, and he'd groaned and complained through the entire procedure, trying Kilu's patience despite her Jedi training. She had the ship's rudimentary medical kit open on the table. Some of the kit's equipment and salves would be considered primitive by any self-respecting medical droid, but the stuff worked. Assuming the patient allowed them to be applied, of course.

"Quit squirming!" she told him.

"You're doing it wrong!" he complained.

"All Jedi have training in emergency field medicine," she asserted, a little haughtily.

"Were you sick that day? OW!" he shouted as she pressed gauze soaked with antiseptic against the wound; it stung. "You did that on purpose!"

"Oh, don't be such a big baby!"

"I'm not a baby," he said, a little more petulantly than he'd intended.

Kilu couldn't help it. She started to laugh. He turned his head and glared at her, which only made her laugh harder. In spite of himself, her mood suddenly became infectious. His lips curled into a smile, then he laughed as well--at himself, and out of relief for surviving their recent ordeal. And because, in spite of what had happened between them several months ago, it felt good--incredibly good--to be in her presence once again.

"It's good to see you, Kilu," Axel, grinning, said earnestly once their laughter died down. His face then became more serious. "I've missed you."

Kilu also became more serious--in fact, her face suddenly became downright unreadable. Axel was taken aback; she had always been able to project that Jedi aura of unflappable cool, but he'd always been able to read her eyes. Not anymore, however; he gazed into her dark brown eyes and couldn't read her mood at all. It was yet another reflection of how far her Jedi training had been progressing, he reflected. And, he thought sadly, how she was growing away from him.

She silently retrieved a sealed antiseptic medipad from the kit and opened its packaging. "I called you because I needed your help, Axel," she told him. "I had no desire to... open any old wounds," she said with an apologetic smile as she pressed the medipad to his injury until its adhesive bonded with his skin. "Or inflict new ones."

Axel glanced at his bandaged wound. "Too bad you can't patch up a broken heart that way," he muttered.

Kilu could not suppress an exasperated sigh. "Axel," she said, "we went over this months ago. You're being unfair, and you know it. I told you how it had to be, how Jedi can't indulge in permanent attachments. And you agreed and understood, or I thought you did. We had what we had, and it was... lovely. And then we got to Coruscant, and you got all..."

"What?" he prompted her, a defensive tone creeping into his voice. "I got all what?"

"...As clingy as a Calamarian octopod," she muttered. In spite of the painful memory it evoked, they both smiled at the colorful metaphor.

Axel turned from her and stared off at a distant corner of the lounge. She was right and he knew it. She'd been very clear from the start that whatever happened between them couldn't be permanent. His head had accepted that, but his heart had seen things differently. So when they arrived at the galactic capital... well, Axel reflected abashedly, he'd made a fool of himself. Her metaphor was apt. He'd told her how he felt. He'd asked her to stay with him. He'd actually got down on his knees, much to her chagrin. He'd begged, he'd cajoled, he'd pleaded, and when none of that worked, the shouting had begun. Knowing how shamefully he'd behaved didn't change the way he felt, however--or invalidate it.

He gingerly pulled his shirt back on, then paused. "What would it be like for you," he asked her quietly, "if tomorrow, you suddenly lost your connection with the Force? If you lost your ability to... see that extra layer of light around everything that makes the entire universe just that much more beautiful and special to you?" He turned his head to look her directly in the eye. "That's what it was like for me. When you left. I tried to suppress it, but... I feel what I feel."

Kilu looked away from him. What could she say to that? Those were words that most females in the galaxy would kill to hear a man say to her. But she was not a typical woman--she was a Jedi. Her life was not her own; it was pledged to a higher purpose. Master Skywalker had made sure she had no illusions when she'd joined the Order: there would be costs, many of them dear. She'd accepted that, or said she had. But it was one thing to accept such costs as a concept. It was quite another to experience them, and the wrenching emotional toll they took, especially for the first time.

"Well," Axel said when he realized Kilu was not going to respond to what he'd said, "it's my problem, isn't it? So I'll just have to deal with it. Somehow," he added, with a rueful grin. "Besides, it sounds like you have bigger problems right now than some love-sick freighter jockey."

Kilu took the hint that he was willing to drop the matter and change subjects, and she was glad for it. "Yes," she said. "I don't even know where we're supposed to be going right now!" She frowned and looked at him, remembering those moments of panic during the firefight above the planet's atmosphere, when Axel had chosen a course, any course, to get them into hyperspace and away from their pursuers. "Where are we going, anyway? Back to Sessram Prime?"

"No," he replied as he buttoned up his shirt. "Since I'm based there, I thought they might head back to the Sessram system to intercept us. So I chose one of my preset courses." He looked at her, and an impish grin appeared on his face. "We're currently headed for Hedonis," he told her.

Kilu's arched auburn brows rose. "The pleasure planet?"

Axel shrugged. "I could use a vacation right about now," he said. "How about you?" Her only response was a cocked eyebrow and a lopsided grin. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

"You go to Hedonis a lot, do you?" she asked pointedly.

"It's one of my most popular passenger fares," he told her. "What, you think I can afford the place? I can barely manage their landing fees!"

"Well, let's figure out where we actually need to go," Kilu said, then reached into her tunic's inside pocket. She pulled out a data chip and held it up in front of her.

"What's on there?" Axel asked her.

"I'm actually not sure," she admitted. "But I think..." she began to say, then hesitated and looked at him. "I was told not to discuss my mission with anyone outside the Jedi Order," she said.

"Oh," Axel said, feeling a little crestfallen.

"But... I know I can trust you," she continued.

He turned to look at her, his blue eyes suddenly burning with intensity. "With your life," he said earnestly.

She didn't respond to that; instead, she simply handed him the data chip. Axel pressed a button on the side of the passenger lounge's table which activated a holographic computer display on the tabletop. He took the data chip and inserted it into a slot in the table. A moment later, the table-based display showed an astronavigational chart in three dimensions. It first depicted the entire galaxy, then slowly zoomed in on the galaxy's outer Tingel Arm, then moved further in until the display narrowed down to a specific star system. The fourth planet in the system was blinking.

"What's this supposed to be?" Axel asked Kilu.

She was silent for a moment, staring at the star chart reverently. Then she took a deep breath and returned her attention to him. "First, a little history lesson," she said. "The Great Jedi Purge at the end of the Old Republic didn't just destroy the Jedi themselves. Many of our records were lost as well. Some we destroyed ourselves, to keep them from falling into the hands of the Sith. But some of the few Jedi who survived the purge took portions of our records with them into hiding. Many of those records are still out there, waiting for us to find them."

"What's in these records?" he asked.

Kilu shrugged. "We won't know until we find them. It could treatises on meditation techniques or fighting styles, lost writings of ancient Jedi masters, or the journals of Jedi whose lives deserve to be remembered--and revered. The point is, all this lost information is sacred to us. You've heard me recite our code: 'There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.' Being without these records is... painful to us. And yes, some of it could have practical applications that could help us."

Axel looked at the astronavigational display in front of him. "So some of your lost records are here on this planet?"

"That's what our source claimed," she said, "before he was killed. Someone else wants that information too."

"Or doesn't want you to find it," Axel posited, and Kilu nodded her acknowledgement of that possibility. "Hey, wait a minute... I know that system," he told her. "Azitchen, it's called. The planet that's blinking is called Cetachuya, but it's uninhabited by sentient life. At least, not anymore."

Kilu cast a sideways glance at him. "If there are no sentients there, how do you know about it?" she asked as a puzzled frown appeared on her features.

"Some smugglers have used it as a secret base in the past," he said.

Kilu smiled. "You know, you keep telling me you're not a smuggler, and then you betray some knowledge like that..."

"Hey, most of the people in my profession are smugglers," he said defensively. "I hang out with them. I hear things."

"Okay," Kilu said with a teasing grin. Then something Axel had said a moment ago caught her attention. "Wait a minute," she said. "What do you mean, there are no sentients there anymore?"

Axel took a deep breath as he stared at the flashing holographic planet. "There was a flourishing civilization there, once... hundreds of thousands of years ago. Pre-spaceflight. Then they all just... vanished."

"They died out?" Kilu asked.

Axel shook his head. "No. No one knows what happened to them. Some of the smugglers say the place is haunted by their spirits."

Kilu mulled this information over. "Well," she said a moment later, "it sounds like a good place to hide something, if the ghost stories will keep away the inquisitive."

Axel tapped the controls on the display console so that the holographic zoomed in further to the planet itself. The graphic displayed a planet that was green and lush, redolent with life, but with heavy cloud cover as well.

"A jungle world," Kilu commented.

The display kept zooming in, flying through the atmosphere to a region of the planet just north of its equator. As the display closed in further, it displayed a high altitude picture depicting a cluster of ancient buildings, some square, some rectangular, all apparently built from stone but difficult to discern because of the vegetation overgrowing them. The display finally came to rest with a bright white outline flashing around one particular stone construction.

"I gather your Jedi records are in there somewhere," Axel said. "The data doesn't seem to get any more localized than that."

"Searching one building is easier than searching a whole planet," Kilu said brightly.

Axel smiled. "The glass is always half-full for you, isn't it?"

Kilu returned his smile. It was good to be working with him again. Of course there was nothing like having another Jedi watching one's back, but some of her compatriots in the Order could be... a little overzealous at times, typical of recent converts to any organization with mystical overtones. She often felt that she was being watched carefully, and judged--and that feeling was often justified. With Axel, she could let her guard down a little and just be herself. Provided, of course, he didn't get all touchy about their relationship. Which, she reminded herself hastily, was all in the past.

Axel relayed the information from the data chip to the Nomad's navigational computer. Within a couple of minutes, the computer indicated with a simple breep that it had calculated the hyperspace path to the new coordinates. Axel used a command on the tabletop to confirm the new course, then he shut down the holo display and the table returned to its usual simple function of being a surface for cups and plates. He handed the data chip back to Kilu.

"We'll be there in about four days," he told her.

She looked back into his eyes, and the same thought crossed both their minds: they were going to be together for four days in close quarters with little to do. Pleasant but now unwelcome memories of what they'd done the last time they'd been together on such a long space voyage flooded their minds. Kilu took a deep breath and sought to center herself in the Force. Axel shifted in his seat and coughed.

"So!" Axel said, firing up the table's holographic display again. "Care for a rousing game of holochess?"