Archive: Yes please! XEB, Broken Circle, DPS, whoever else wants
it; just let me know where it ends up.
Archive Date: February 12, 2001
Category: action/adventure, angst
Disclaimer: not mine, alas, no matter *how* many toys I buy.
Everything here belongs to George.
Feedback: is very much appreciated, but not essential -- I'll
post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....
Notes: more DPS fic. You know the drill by now. *g* Thanks to
Dee and RavenD for looking this thing over for me!
Rating: R
Summary: ...sometimes they go with a bang and sometimes they go
with a whimper...
Warnings: character death
"I have such a bad feeling about this...."
Crouched in the shadow of a low wall, Xanatos chewed on the end of his ebony braid and scanned his surroundings for the seventh time in a minute. Ahead of him he could feel his master's presence and he focused on Qui-Gon's Force signature as a way to maintain his calm centre. He had never been good at waiting for action.
They had been tracking this group of terrorists for over a week now, following hunches and patterns and what few clues the Yereshan security forces had managed to glean about their movements. In the war-pitted wastelands of Yeresha's southern continent it was easy to lose track of anything that didn't want to be found, ruined buildings and deserted mineshafts giving easy cover. A separatist group from one of the land masses of the northern hemisphere had kidnapped the daughter of the world's Senator, taking her south and vanishing into the blasted remains to make their demands. The Yereshans, deciding that the Senator and his family were Republic business, had promptly requested Jedi help.
Xanatos fidgeted and wondered, not for the first time, why their hosts couldn't do their own dirty work. They knew the territory best, after all. At seventeen years of age he often found himself questioning motives and intentions, even when Qui-Gon seemed to blithely accept them as part and parcel of the job. It was something he would understand when he was older, his master told him, as frustratingly calm and contained as ever. The padawan wasn't convinced that he would ever live long enough to understand half of Qui-Gon's notions.
There was movement to the left -- someone leaving the shelter of the main structure they were surveying to vanish into one of the smaller blocks. Peering over the broken edge of the wall, Xanatos recognised the woman as one of their targets and spat out his braid. Finally, they might get to see some excitement. He glanced across at Qui-Gon, saw the signal to prepare himself... and then they were moving, keeping to the shadows as they closed in on their objective.
A sentry stepped out of a gap in the wall, almost directly into Qui-Gon's path. There was a flash of green light, a 'sabre activated and doused within half a second, but enough to silence the hapless guard for good. Not sparing a thought for the dead man, Xanatos slipped into the building, knowing his part in the task ahead. Slender and lithe, more suited to stealth than his solidly-built master, he was to seek out the kidnapped girl and get her to safety while Qui-Gon drew any fire and dealt with the abductors. It was a situation they'd trained for and had already carried out once or twice in the past. It was dangerous but not overly so... and there was definitely something to be said for the whole Damsel In Distress scenario, especially when you happened to be a hormonal seventeen year old boy.
Moving quickly through the building, taking advantage of every scrap of cover he could find, Xanatos let the Force guide him towards his goal. He would occasionally see members of the terrorist gang but he made no move to intercept them -- their lack of concern indicated that Qui-Gon's presence had not yet been noticed and he had no desire to call attention to their Jedi guests. They'd find out soon enough. For now, he just had to get to their victim.
He was ghosting past a set of wide doors when something brushed against his consciousness, a Force-driven whisper that here was something to see. Pausing, he glanced around, almost expecting company, but he was alone in the corridor. Well then, only one thing to do....
A moment's attention disabled the motion alarm attached to the door and the padawan carefully pushed his way inside. A large room was stacked with boxes and canisters, their labels in a language that Xanatos had to pause for a moment to translate, casting his mind back to his linguistics classes... and then he felt his jaw drop and a feeling of dread grip his stomach.
Explosives. The room was an explosives warehouse. Looking over some of the other crates he found missile launchers, blasters of several varieties, vacuum mines... the place was a virtual arsenal. Apparently there was more going on here than a simple kidnapping and demands for independence. There was enough in this one chamber to start a war....
Swallowing hard, Xanatos slipped back out, closing the room behind him. He would alert Qui-Gon to it later but for now the girl was still his primary objective. She had to be around here somewhere....
Finally, he peered around a corner to find a sentry standing guard by a doorway, one hand resting casually on his blaster. A touch of Force sent the rusted cover of a ventilation shaft crashing to the ground at the other end of the hall and the padawan used to guard's distraction to cover the distance between them and break the man's neck. The lock on the door gave up without resistance and he barged in to only narrowly avoid being decapitated by a well-aimed chair. Apparently the damsel had decided to start inflicting some distress of her own on her captors....
She stopped her assault in the moment she registered his appearance. "Who are you?"
"I am Padawan Xanatos sel Crionen of the Jedi; I'm here to rescue you." They eyed one another warily for a moment. The girl -- he struggled to remember her name and dismissed the detail as unimportant -- was a year or two his senior with short blonde hair and a face that was more plain than pretty, not least because she didn't appear to have been allowed to wash since her abduction. "The sooner we start moving, the sooner you get out of here."
The girl sniffed. "Aren't you a little young for a Jedi? I expected a man, not a boy."
"I was man enough to get in here," the padawan pointed out, his teenaged pride suddenly dented. He turned and kicked the door open, holding it with his boot as he dragged the body of the sentry into the room. "And man enough to handle this idiot. Now, are you coming with me or not?"
They'd almost made it back to the outside world when the shouting began, blaster fire ringing loud within the confines of the building. Somewhere ahead, Xanatos could see the slender green spark of his master's lightsabre deflecting bolts and carving away a gantry support to throw three of his attackers to the ground. The padawan waited until the last moment before igniting his own crimson blade, pushing the girl behind him for safety. Qui-Gon smiled at him, his expression and the warmth across the training bond telling him that he had done well, and Xanatos basked in the feeling for a moment before remembering that they weren't safe yet.
"How far to the speeders?" he asked his master. They had found the vehicles hidden in a ravine earlier and had disabled all but two, thinking to use them in their escape. The challenge would be in getting back to them....
"There are more of them here than I thought there were," Qui-Gon admitted, using the downed gantry for temporary cover. "This may be trickier than anticipated."
Xanatos nodded, then a thought occurred to him. "Can you get yourself and our guest out of the building, Master?"
"Why?" Qui-Gon looked concerned. "Xani, I don't want you taking unnecessary risks."
"I'll be fine, Master, really. I have an idea for a diversion but I need you to get out of the building... and away from the building. Get one of the speeders and circle around to pick me up -- I'll meet you by the wall we hid behind earlier."
"Xani...."
"Yes, Master?"
Qui-Gon looked at him with such pride that Xanatos thought he might just burst. "Be careful."
"Of course, Master!"
Retracing his steps was trickier this time, trying to avoid the firefight as much as possible. Keeping low and with his 'sabre extinguished, Xanatos managed to avoid notice until he was back at the mouth of the main corridor that led into the bowels of the terrorists' complex. He felt the shot coming at him almost before it was fired, turning and raising his lightsabre in a deflective move that sent the bolt back into the throat of the woman who had fired on him. The sudden blaze of red drew attention to his position and he suddenly found himself a target... halving the assault on Qui-Gon as he had hoped. Now he just had to implement the second part of his plan....
Racing down the hallway, he followed his earlier path, dancing and twirling to deflect blaster fire every now and then. The more thought he gave his current situation, the more insane it seemed, but he was committed to his course of action now and wasn't about the back down from it. It wasn't as if he could really leave all those weapons there, after all.
As he rounded the last corner and dove for the heavy doors, Xanatos became aware that his pursuers had stopped firing and were instead milling in confusion behind him as they realised his plan. He grinned fiercely as he gained entry to the arsenal, wondering where to start. If he got the timing right, he might just get out of this one alive....
After a swift examination of the options open to him, he finally settled on a crate of malleable explosive sitting amongst the blaster boxes. Set off correctly, it should give him just enough time to get clear before the inevitable chain reaction found the main stockpile and blew the entire building off the map, possibly in the company of large chunks of the local geography -- he wasn't entirely certain how much firepower he was dealing with here. Still, he told himself, there was only one way to find out.
As he drove his lightsabre into a corner of the crate, he mused that if the explosion didn't kill him, his master probably would....
Xanatos managed to overtake his fleeing pursuers on the way out, using all the speed the Force would grant him as he tried to outrun the shockwave. The training bond was not telepathic between humans, but the empathic and sensory fragments he was receiving from Qui-Gon told him that his master had indeed gotten clear of the building by some considerable remove and was now extremely concerned for his absent apprentice. Trying not to project panic, Xanatos attempted to send reassurance to the elder Jedi, but it wasn't easy with the heated rush of air that suddenly surrounded him and turned the world to gold and scarlet for an impossible instant....
Blinking his way back into the land of the living, Xanatos attempted to take stock of his situation. He was still alive -- that much was obvious -- and he appeared to be outside if the open sky were any indication, but his entire body felt raw and broken. A swift internal scan revealed several broken bones, more ribs cracked than not, something bleeding below the diaphragm, and more burns than he really cared to think about. His eyebrows and lashes were gone but, he was perversely relieved to notice, his braid appeared to be intact, if a little singed. At least the burnt sections wouldn't show, given his hair colour....
Never before had the thought of bacta tanks seemed so good.
Voices drew his attention, their tones unfamiliar, and the padawan realised with a jolt that he had not been the only survivor of the blast. Not wanting to be caught in the open, he tried to scramble for cover, the broken edges of bones grinding agonisingly beneath his blackened skin. He bit back a scream... and almost sobbed with relief as he heard the sound of an aircar and felt the brush of Qui-Gon's presence through the training bond. He was going to make it. He knew he was going to make it.
The 'car purred to a gentle landing and Xanatos looked up to see the blonde girl at the controls as Qui-Gon leaned out, reaching for him with a look of mingled concern and relief. Grinning past cracked lips, he pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, stretching towards his master's arms....
There was a sound of a blaster shot... a moment of unbearable, searing pain centred between his shoulder blades... the sensation of being in Qui-Gon's arms while his master's emotions surged around him in a confused torrent... a sense of rising through the air at speed... a glimpse of a burning cloud darkening the dawn sky... the feeling of another's tears falling against his face... and then a spiralling sense of nothingness that blanketed his senses and mercifully carried him down and away from the pain....
Epilogue:
Obi-Wan sat on his bags, waiting for the shuttle to arrive. It didn't seem real. For almost twelve years he had believed that his destiny was to be a Jedi Knight but now... now it looked as though he was fated to be a farmer. It had all been for nothing. No knight was going to come for him, no master to claim him at the last minute. It was over.
Sighing, he looked at the decking under his feet. Before long he would be on Bandomeer -- wherever that was -- trying to make a living scraping in the dirt. Idly, he wondered if Bruck would be along to join him when his time came; one way or another, their rivalry was over now and a familiar face would be welcome, no matter their past history. But Bruck had another two months to go. Bruck still had some substance to his ambitions....
Obi-Wan had nothing.
Across the platform an atmospheric craft set down, bearing the emblems of the Senate on its side panels. Obi-Wan watched the ramp slide smoothly to the deck of the landing platform, a faint hope stirring in his guts as he watched brown-robed figures disembark... but no, he recognised the pair and knew that there was no chance of selection there. Settling back on his bags, he watched as Master Qui-Gon Jinn strode across the platform, deep in conversation with his padawan. Meheral, tall and slender with a long, dark brown braid, was twenty-three, still a few years from his knighthood, and it was common knowledge that he and Jinn were lovers. Temple gossip had it that Master Jinn's previous padawan had died heroically and that Jinn had taken Meheral as soon as the mourning period was over, wanting to celebrate the other boy's spirit in the training of another. Temple gossip said that they had fallen in love soon after Meheral had come of age and that they would formalise their relationship as soon as Meheral's braid was cut....
Temple gossip said an awful lot. It was one of the things that Obi-Wan was going to miss on Bandomeer.
Watching master and apprentice vanish into the Temple, hearing their laughter trailing behind them, Obi-Wan wondered what it was liked to be loved that deeply and whether he would ever know that depth of emotion. It seemed unlikely but it was a hope that he could cling to in the years ahead, something to replace the dream of knighthood that he now knew to be dead.
Turning his face to the dirty clouds of Coruscant, Obi-Wan finally resigned himself to his fate and waited for his shuttle to land.