Legacy IV
Chapter 24
The Watcher drove his ship up through Tatooine's blistered heavens, an inverted meteorite streaking back to the void above, seeking refuge in limitless hollow space.
He clutched the throbbing stump of his wrist against his chest, snarling as the pain wormed and writhed its way into bone and breath, every nerve ending pulsing with a livid fire. Agony gave him strength - clarity. His hatred leapt and spun beneath the bellows of this insult, the indelible mark left upon his flesh. He yearned no longer; now he possessed, he owned the object of his obsession. Pain bound them together, a mutually bestowed gift, a pledge consummated in the loss of a hand, in the molten ruins of a Jedi master's chest.
He threw his head back, allowing the fire in his veins to peak, to carry him close to the brink of unconsciousness. It thundered against his psyche like a black sea, and with each retreating tidal pulse, he was left scoured and pure, the smooth-washed sands of his hatred like virgin ash upon some volcanic shore. He had not yet completed his task, his apotheosis to Lordship – but he had won the first skirmish, wooed and conquered his Chosen match..
He had tasted and scented hate on the young Jedi, or something perilously near…. And he had pierced him to the core, a brand of ownership the victim would not soon forget. The contemplation of such vicarious agony ameliorated his own, eclipsed the rage bubbling in his blood. Victory was not peace but domination; triumph was his who struck the graver blow.
The barren world's thin mantle fell away beneath him; a crusted panoply of starlight beckoned. Fumbling the navcomp with his left hand, he punched in coordinates to the secret rendezvous his master had revealed to him but recently, the refuge in time of need. Licking his parched lips, he shivered at the thought of what punishment awaited him, groveling beneath those merciless boots. Imagination but tenuously skirted the edges of that inexorable wrath – even this obscure hint of things to come sent a chill of taut anticipation through his bowels. Master was a name deplored, abjectly worshiped; loathed and longed for; hated and loved. His soul railed in fury against all that it represented, and yet lusted wildly for that which it proffered, a prize held tauntingly before a famished prisoner, torment and reward at once.
Master's retribution would be swift, and awful, a deserved ecstasy of pain.
It would make him stronger.
The proximity sensors abruptly sounded a warning klaxon: unidentified vessels to starboard and port. Grunting in dismay, danger lancing through the Force fleet as lightning, he seized the yoke and commenced evasive maneuvers, only to discover the enemy ships had already locked on twin tractor beams. A bright flash of plasma zipped past his bows, clear warning that resistance was futile.
Snarling, he fingered the weapon's hilt still intact upon his belt, the last thing salvaged from the disastrous battleground below. He would teach a lesson to these interlopers….
But as the distance between them closed, he recognized the noxious insignia upon the newcomer's hull: the winged flame, proud banner of his Order's entrenched, primordial enemies. The Jedi had come for him. He had been betrayed, anticipated.
His first instinct was inchoate rage, a desire to immolate them all in a single explosive blast; he had but to activate his ship's auto-destruct to clinch such a pyrrhic victory. But the Dark whispered to him of other ways, of more devious and subtle snares, of deceit and serpent's wisdom. Limbs slackening, a grin drawing his lips back over yellowed teeth, he acquiesced to the promptings of his deeper self, the one clothed already in the pomp and majesty of perdition.
Let the accursed Sentinels come. He would surrender to them, seduce them with the honeyed lie of surrender, feint and retreat - and then, when the time was ripe, teach the arrogant and sanctimonious simpletons what it truly meant to be a "Shadow."
When the Jedi boarded his vessel a scant few minutes later, they found him chuckling to himself in the cockpit, and glibly attributed his mood to madness or else shock-induced hysteria.
They were wrong. So very, very wrong.
When black splotches floated before his eyes, like so many dark glowbugs flittering in a summer dusk, Anakin remembered to breathe.
He snapped shut his gaping jaw, swallowed, and blinked. "Wizard," he breathed, reverently.
Beside him at the main pilot's station, Torbb Bakk'ile smiled. Just a little bit. She was stern, and huge. And slightly scary, although mostly nice. "Never seen a hyperspace tunnel before, hm?"
He shook his head, watching the lazy sworls of light ooze past their viewport, blue and white smearing into a continuous maze, a sinuously flowing kaleidoscope. He'd expected flying through transdimensional colocalized introspansive void to be like racing a pod, only faster. At least, that's what he'd imagined, perusing the one or two hyperdrive manuals he'd filched from Watto's store. It was hard to visualize based on mathematical formulae and dry academic text. But hyperspace turned out to be more like….
Winning.
Or like leaving.
That freefall sensation of unshackled, unstoppable plummeting into a new reality, into the unknown and the undefined. As though Tatooine and home and Mom were melting and smearing with the disjointed light just outside that transparisteel pane, as though the future were a gaping maw sucking him in, a vortex so vast and blank that he would surely be lost in its frigid, inky depths, swallowed whole and spat out like the carapace of a beetle once the innards had been licked clean, a shiny empty shell of himself.
He wrapped both arms around his shivering frame and realized something else about space travel. "It's cold," he lamented.
The huge Jedi next to him flicked her stern gaze sideways. "There are extra thermal blankets in the aft cabin. Space is cold." An indifferent shrug, one that bespoke decades' experience, the easy apathy of a veteran.
"Okay," Anakin mumbled, sliding out of the copilot's seat and slinking to the hatchway on tiptoes. He wasn't sure, but prob'ly flying a spaceship required a lot of concentration, and he didn't want to disrupt hers.
In the next compartment, it was dim and even colder- not just in the air but everywhere, even inside where you couldn't see. It was kinda hard to explain, but that's how it was. Mister Qui-Gon was lying on the inset bunk, with his eyes closed, looking pretty waxen and white and dead. Mostly he was covered by a thin sheet, but they hadn't covered his face, maybe cause he was only mostly dead and not all the way. Anakin didn't understand what animate suspension meant, so he wasn't sure. The only lights were tiny emergency blues running along the decks. And Mister Obi-Wan was sitting in the corner, or actually kinda kneeling there in the corner, with his eyes closed too. Only you could tell he wasn't asleep. He was just sorta thinking or something.
He'd wiped the blood off his face and pulled his hair back so he didn't look such an awful mess as before, and he had pretty big blanket, too. He was like the only warm thing in the whole cabin, or maybe in the whole universe. And all of a sudden Anakin didn't just want to fetch a blanket for himself. He needed to be warm . So he approached, haltingly, and tugged on one corner of the double-woven cloth.
"Um….. sorry."
Mister Obi-Wan opened his eyes, then. He looked sad, really sad. And tired. "Anakin."
"I'm cold." He scuffed the deck with one foot. If Mom were here, she would know what to do. But Mom wasn't here. She was far, far away, left behind on Tatooine while he hurtled toward a faraway planet called Coruscant, where the Jedi Temple was located, where he would be safe, where…. he didn't know what. It had all happened so fast.
"Space is cold," the young Jedi agreed. One corner of his mouth twitched, like he might have remembered something funny or happy, but his eyes stayed sad. "I've always found it so, anyway."
Anakin edged closer. "Mister Qui-Gon's not really dead, right?" he whispered. "'Cause nobody can kill a Jedi."
Obi-Wan blinked a couple times, and looked away. "If only that were true," he said, kind of bittersweet and very softly. He looked more like a kid in the weird blue lighting, even with the blond and red stubble on his chin and cheeks, and the blood stains on his tunic and the weapon hilt at his belt. Anakin remembered thinking that there was no way he could be a Jedi, the first time they'd met. He'd been expecting something far less… human.
"Are you cold too?" he inquired, bluntly.
That got him a faint quirking of the brows. He bit his lip, wondering if he'd broken an unspoken rule or something, like children should be seen and not heard- but then the wizardest thing happened. Obi-Wan flicked one side of his blanket open in clear invitation. Anakin was snugged down beside him in a heartbeat, relishing the contact, the animal closeness, the blanket's flimsy armor wrapped round both their shoulders.
And it was warm that way, too. On Tatooine, in the poorly insulated slave quarters, that's how you stayed cozy on winter nights. Such occasions constituted some of his most cherished memories.
"I miss my Mom," he confessed, burrowing closer.
"I am sorry. Our departure was hasty, and you must be confused."
"I'm okay," he retorted, making it true by asserting it boldly. He was the Boonta Eve Podracing Champion. And he was traveling across the stars. With Jedi. "…Maybe adventures are always confusing at the beginning?"
Mister Obi-Wan made a quiet sound, mostly like a sigh but a little like a hoarse laugh. "Often at the end, too … and in the middle."
A daunting proposition, one which cast hero-ness in a novel light. He frowned, pondering it. "Well then, how do you ever know the right thing to do? If adventures are confusing like that?"
"That, my young friend, is why we have the Force."
'Force' was still a nebulous concept to Anakin, but friend he understood. He latched onto the word, onto its implications, whether intentional or not, and sank deeper into the warmth kindling between them. He was confused, and lonely, and tired. Very tired. A thousand million questions swirled in his head, demanding answers, demanding explication and clarity, but his exhaustion could maintain but the feeblest hold upon any of them. Soon he was heavy-lidded, and speech an impossible task. He slumped against the only source of comfort present to him , and let waiting slumber claim its due.
He dreamt of white spires, and menacing figures clothed in fire and shadow, of howling speed and hot wind, starlight and sunset - but mostly of Shmi's wise, gentle smile.
Cliegg Lars set the high-power transmitter the Jedi had given him among the other tech equipment in the farmhouse's humble kitchen, shaking his head a little. The 'extra' unit – hastily exhumed from the Republic shuttle's storage compartments – would cost somewhere in the vicinity of his entire year's income, here on Tatoiine. He might be one of, say, three men who owned such a piece of circuitry; he had no intention of letting word get around. Wealth was a dangerous thing.
And this wasn't for show – it was for Shmi. The younger Jedi, much less exotic and intimidating than the lady-Knight one who's accompanied him, had reminded them that the comm relay would only work during half the year, due to the planet's orbital path and the interference patterns generated by the twin suns. Also that the nearest Republic hub station could only receive and transmit messages, not a livetime holo. But that thin thread of connection had been sufficient for Shmi. She would be able to communicate with her son, however mediately.
Shmi was a good woman, a heart of rarest aurodium. She didn't want much, didn't demand anything.
He wrapped an arm about her now, as they stood in his – their- solarium courtyard.
"How long will it take for them to reach Coruscant?" she wondered aloud.
"Oh, it takes days on a passenger freighter from this far out. But I reckon that ship they had is a mite faster than I've ever flown upon."
She nestled close beside him, shivering slightly in the early morning chill. Soon they would venture forth to collect mushrooms, to begin the quotidian labor cycle, the quiet yoke of their allotted destiny. "There is so much I wish I could have told him…. Days and weeks of goodbye," she murmured.
Cliegg sighed. "He would have been welcome here, you know. Owen and he could have been brothers. It could have worked."
But Shmi shook her head. "No…. it is meant to be this way." Her head tipped sideways, to rest against his shoulder. "Ani is special. I've always known it. He must forge his own destiny. Did you know… Master Jinn even thought he might be a Jedi someday."
Lars snorted. "Now there's an idea!"
Dawn's first pinks and golds spilled over the edge of the open roof above, a warm froth atop the hot deluge soon to follow. The sky faded from indigo to glowing cerulean, cloudless and illusorily close as ever. Somewhere in the background, a vaporator's generator circuits kicked into motion, thrumming subliminally in counterpoint to the last chirping rock beetles outside the earthen dwelling's walls.
"Well," Cliegg rumbled, pecking his beloved upon her weather-worn cheek, "We'd best get on with it."
END BOOK 4