weetuskenraider | Coruscant, The Ruins of the Old Jedi Temple, Saturday Fandom Time

Tahiri and her two Jedi Master companions had circled around the Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers that hovered outside the collapsed hole the construction droid had bored into the side of a ziggurat, and met up with Face on a floor half a kilometer up.

"Interesting," Luke said.

"What?" Tahiri asked; she hated it when people just said that, and didn't elaborate. She, like Luke, Mara, and Face, was peering at the ziggurat with the giant hole in it where the skyscraper-sized construction droid they'd been following, the one that the mind-controlled workers had been excavating, had plowed into the wall. The ziggurat that was now attracting coralskippers like bantha droppings attracted flies.

"This is one of the monolithic blocks that served the Old Republic as a government center," Luke said. "A lot of it belonged to secondary bureaus, to embassies and legations from non-Republic worlds, and to businesses and organizations more or less allied with the Old Republic."

"How do you know that?" she demanded skeptically.

"Because, youngster, the few surviving databases and filemaps that mentioned the old Jedi Temple indicated that it was --" Luke pointed. "-- somewhere there. I've been all through it, kilometers and kilometers of it. By the time I got to look at it, of course, Emperor Palpatine had long destroyed every remaining trace of the Jedi."

"Maybe not every trace," Mara said. "Why do you suppose Lord Nyax is digging there?"

"Because he has some kind of implanted memories or instincts?" Luke suggested after a moment's thought. "Perhaps he wants to destroy any remnant of the Temple because of lingering emotions. Or maybe he knows about some portion of it that was never on the public databases."

"Either way," Mara said, "we have to find out."

Luke smiled. "One of the advantages about having been all through that region is that I know quite a few ways in and out. C'mon, let's bypass these skips."

The construction droid was hammering away at the ziggurat from the inside with not much to show for its efforts; that glossy black wall was stubborn. It had done plenty of damage to the building they were in now when it had barrelled through, though, and the floor kept making disturbing noises that Tahiri was pretty sure meant it would give in on them any second.

Through a crack in the wall she could see, if she strained a little, starving and unarmed Coruscant survivors clashing with the Yuuzhan Vong warriors that were rushing the construction droid. The survivors outnumbered the warriors easily, and some of the healthier ones were trying to bash in Yuuzhan Vong skulls with chunks of stone. It wasn't pretty at all.

"He's near," Luke noted. "He's calling to them. Calling for help."

"I know. I can feel him. In my head," Face answered worriedly. "I want to go down there." He looked up into their worried expressions, offered them a wan smile. "Well, mostly I don't. But I can feel the draw."

"You're strong," Tahiri said by way of explanation. "Well fed. You have hope still. He'd have to exert himself more to control you. But I suspect he can. I'm not sure he can't control us," she added, swallowing hard.

A comm came in from Kell, who gleefully reported to Face that he'd found a spaceworthy transport to get them back to Borleias. It was blocked in by several tons of rubble, but Kell's nickname wasn't Explosion Boy for nothing.

Luke spoke up again when Kell had signed off and gone to make more things explode. "Face, our mission is over. I want you to round up the others, get to that transport, and prepare to leave Coruscant."

"And what about you silly Jedi types?" From his expression, Face must have wanted to think it was a joke.

"We're going down there. If we die here, the other Jedi need to know about Lord Nyax. You're going to tell them," Luke said. Tahiri thought her stomach had just dropped about three floors down. She didn't like the sound of that, but she had signed on to this.

"I normally try to argue against suicide missions," Face said. He clearly didn't think it was a joke any more.

Luke countered with, "But you know what Lord Nyax can do."

"Yes. So all I can do is wish you luck," Face said, more serious than Tahiri had ever seen him on this mission, and left.

"Ready?" Luke asked them.

"Ready," Tahiri said, not hesitating; Mara just nodded, and Luke ignited his lightsaber to widen the crack they'd been watching through to make a passage.

***

They dropped through a hole in the ceiling -- a dramatic entrance, but Tahiri was too preoccupied by using the Force to slow her descent to appreciate the theatrics of it. She did, however, take a moment to appreciate the shoes she'd taken to wearing out of necessity on Coruscant's contaminated surface, because riding down the slope of the wall on her bare feet would have sucked, Force assistance or not.

She and Anakin had invented a game when they were younger and running around in the forests of Yavin 4 between classes at the academy: their falling-dance, they'd called it. They'd jump down a hole, or off the side of the temple, and reach out to each other in the Force to slow each other's fall. This was a little something like that, only this time Tahiri was doing it on her own.

She could see, up ahead of them, all six red lightsaber blades igniting on Lord Nyax's body, and Luke pushing off the wall in a move that catapulted him behind the twisted Dark Jedi. Lord Nyax countered by Force-shoving a jagged piece of stone that would have cut Luke's legs off if he hadn't anticipated the move and landed on top of the stone, then used the momentum to launch himself toward Nyax again. She and Mara sprang in opposite directions to avoid the oncoming stone, their lightsabers blazing to life in unison.

And then a single Force-projected thought slammed past all their shields and straight into their minds, flattening all three of them to the ground.

I need to go attack the Yuuzhan Vong, Tahiri thought. Turn off my lightsaber, walk away from here, and go after them. She scrambled up off the ground, her movements echoing Luke and Mara's. But wait, no. She couldn't do that. But she had to. But she couldn't. But, but, but . . .

She couldn't move, the confusion was that strong. None of them could. None of them could do a thing to close themselves off from the power of the one thought that wasn't their own, the one thought that was taking over every corner of their minds. Tahiri could feel Luke's presence reaching out to hers, and knew he and Mara were just as incapable of moving as she was. She could feel Lord Nyax's growing impatience that bled into anger, and then let loose in an all-out Force assault of pure pain that knocked them all flat again.

It was like every extremity in Tahiri's body had exploded at once; in the corners of her peripheral vision Mara and Luke were sprawled on the ground, writhing in agony, probably experiencing the same thing.

Except she'd experienced pain like this before, in the shaper damutek on Yavin 4 at Mezhan Kwaad's hands, when she'd been hooked up to that provoker spineray. When they'd tested the full extent of her pain receptors, changed her brain, given her their memories and language. She, unlike them, was part Yuuzhan Vong inside. And for once she was completely okay with that.

She took that pain, and welcomed it almost gleefully. She didn't fight it; she opened herself up to it and just let it flow through her, take her over until she was the pain. And slowly she rolled over onto her stomach and pushed herself to her feet, even though her every nerve ending seemed like it was about to go supernova and fought her conscious control. Her fingers wrapped around her lightsaber and found the power stud, and the ice-blue blade hummed to life.

"I know something about pain you don't," she gritted out, and she felt like she could have scorched Nyax just by looking at him. "Pain drowns other people. I just swim in it."

She took another step forward and felt Nyax's confusion at the fact that she was standing ripple through the Force -- then a stone came flying toward him, slamming into his back. Tahiri would have thanked the still-immobile Luke for it, but now she was springing toward Nyax with her lightsaber gripped in both hands, her heart pounding in her chest, putting everything she had into an attacking blow. He intercepted it with one of his arm-blades and shoved off from a pile of debris, sliding away from her and leaving a trail of skin and blood behind him.

Tahiri felt Nyax's surprise and anger at even the trivial wound inflicted by Luke's Force-propelled rock for all of a moment before he hurled another blast of emotion at her. It wasn't words so much as an incoherent thought, but what it amounted to was: Remember what it felt like when Anakin died? Don't you still wish you'd died with him?

And it sounded, for one long, awful moment, so very, very good. So simple. It wouldn't be that hard, would it? Just to drop her lightsaber and stand there -- it'd only take a moment and it wouldn't even hurt. Just walk away from everything. Let it all go. Because nothing else mattered.

Except it did matter. A lot did.

She could have almost laughed and cried at the same time when she realized that the tactic wasn't going to work on her now. Months ago it might have, but the temptation wasn't as overwhelming as it used to be. Death didn't seem like the less painful, more preferable alternative any more. Ben in this world wasn't going to lose the chance to get to know his parents if she had anything to do with it. Ben back in Fandom wasn't going to have his worry realized that she'd gotten called home and never came back. She'd promised Dinah they'd spar again; she and Firekeeper had more exploring of the Preserve to do; she still owed Hurley ice cream for all the times he'd treated her to it; she'd asked Jaina for flying lessons; she was going to get into that flight simulator and make at least one successful landing without crashing out, damn it. There were a dozen unfulfilled promises she'd left hanging, and she'd had enough of unfulfilled promises.

No, Tahiri answered in her mind, calm, even smiling. No, I really don't.

Luke and Mara were standing now, shaky but upright, and she let her mind mesh with theirs as Nyax continued to bombard them with mental assaults. Mara, cool and logical, took apart the lies; Luke, more emotional than she, countered the hatred; Tahiri took their shared pain, transmuted it into strength, fed it back to them.

Nyax looked between them, and something flickered across his face, like the expression of a terrified and very small child.

Then the glossy black wall broke, and something on the other side crashed over them.

***

It had taken a few minutes to reorient themselves when they came to, and while those first few minutes of not remembering anything had been unpleasant it wasn't much fun either when two sets of memories came flooding back into Tahiri's mind. She shoved that other, unwelcome set back into its corner, but that was a little harder.

They made their getaway in the construction droid, though it was somewhat complicated by having to herd the no longer mind-controlled slaves to safety. (Although tapping into that fountain of Force energy and smashing Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers just by gesturing and sending the entire face of a building into them? That had been cool.) Then they noticed the column of broken stone rising from the ziggurat they'd just fled: it was kind of pretty, actually, or would have been if it wasn't so capable of smashing things. Nyax floated above the center of the column, making giant boulders do a complex dance through the floating rubble.

"Another Jedi academy graduate," Tahiri said from their vantage point on the construction droid's roof. "He can lift really big rocks."

"Very funny," Luke said. "Let's go."

They were ridiculously high in the air, and the wind up here was vicious, but Tahiri, Mara, and Luke hitched a ride on a passing levitating boulder anyway. Nyax had detected their presence, though -- she could feel it -- and his smile turned into something very different as he turned to face them.

"This is going to be bad," Luke muttered.

"Any ideas?" asked Mara.

Tahiri was kneeling to keep her balance, eyes fixed on the paths of the flying boulders in front of them: their path carried them very, very close to Nyax's position. She was thinking fast, lips moving silently as she worked something out, and okay, stressing out a lot about whether or not to speak up; they'd never treated her like it on this mission so far but she was still a little afraid of being the Kid Who Always Screws Things Up again. But nobody else was volunteering, so . . .

"I have one," she said, pointing to a certain part of their trajectory, where the boulders took a sharp curve and came within meters of where Nyax hovered. "Distract him. I'll finish him."

"You'll finish him," Luke echoed. "How?"

There was something a little strange in her smile; she couldn't quite explain how she'd figured this out. At least not now. It was a funny story now, sure, but this was an incredibly inappropriate time to explain about Fandom's weeklong sexual frustration issue and how she'd tried to deal with the headache it gave her. "He could fight the Jedi just by feeling us in the Force. He couldn't feel the Yuuzhan Vong, so he had to watch. Well . . ." She got to her feet. "I'm both," she said, and jumped. That's it. I've gone completely, totally thermal.

She was three boulders ahead of Luke and Mara when she flattened herself against the rock surface and held on with one hand. Meanwhile, she shut her eyes and did the same thing she'd done that night back in Fandom, when she'd succeeded in temporarily damping her ability to be sensed by the Force: the little deliberate mental twist that let her fall into Riina Kwaad's thought process.

She saw a flash of green whiz by on one side of her, and on the other side a flash of blue. Distraction by way of hurled lightsabers? Nice touch, especially considering their fancy flight patterns. Enhanced abilities due to the Force nexus beneath them? Even nicer, and Tahiri, lost in the moment, had to take a moment to appreciate the ease of hurling two giant boulders with spine-shattering velocity straight into Nyax's back, just below the armor plate implanted beneath his skin, with barely more than a thought. She might even have laughed, but if she did the shrieking of the wind drowned it out.

Nyax was swaying now, as if he couldn't comprehend why his limbs weren't cooperating the way he wanted them to, and there was something in his eyes when he caught sight of Tahiri's face that she couldn't quite puzzle out. Didn't really care to, actually; there was no way she could have known that her eyes had gone hard, even cold. Her boulder was making that sharp turn toward him now, and she held up the razor bug she'd taken from one of the fallen Yuuzhan Vong warriors earlier: that ought to confuse him even more. She drew her arm back, ready to throw --

Nyax's legs finally gave out, and he toppled over through the hole, back into the ziggurat. As he did, all the boulders that had been dancing in the air crashed to the ground. Including the one Tahiri was on.

It was possible she hadn't thought that detail all the way through.

Because the ground was racing up to meet her awfully fast.

Tahiri looked down. "Oh, Sithspit."

***

They were in the cabin of the Ugly Truth, the ship the Wraiths had commandeered, and Tahiri was convinced that Kell was putting the thing through internal organ-rearranging maneuvers just to drive her crazy. Nyax was gone for sure now, having finally succumbed to his wounds and to the massive fire he'd taken from incoming Yuuzhan Vong ships, but the streams of rubble were still pouring out of the hole in what had once been the Jedi Temple.

"It's going to continue," Luke said, "as long as some part of him is there. As long as some part of him can exert his will on his surroundings, and that wellspring of the Force allows it to happen. But he's gone." He took a deep breath. "Let's go home."

It wasn't quite that clean-cut, of course -- they detoured back to the bay where they'd picked up the Ugly Truth in response to a comm signal and ended up watching as Viqi Shesh, the former Kuati senator, threw herself out a shattered viewport rather than be killed by a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. Tahiri wasn't exactly sorry; this was the woman who'd kidnapped Ben.

"Now we can go," said Luke, obviously shaken.

Tahiri stared at him, confused. "Before, you said 'go home.' I thought this was your home. Coruscant."

"No." Luke put an arm around her shoulders, his other arm around Mara's. "I thought it was, but I was wrong. No matter what color the sun is, no matter what the furniture is like, home is where my family is."

Tahiri was too tired to press further, and luckily too worn out to have a moment of mental flail at the statement, because there was no way she could have hidden that reaction. Which was namely "UM." Instead, she just yawned and closed her eyes.

"Can I go back to Fandom now?" she asked.

Mara's voice held notes of relief and curiosity as she asked, "You really want that, don't you?"

"Uh huh," Tahiri answered. "Have friends there. I like it."

"Seems like it's been good for you. Okay, soon as we get back to Borleias I'll arrange a transport."

"Yeah. Thanks. Just do me a favor? Next time you see Ben, give him an extra hug." She yawned again, offered them the first genuinely unguarded smile they'd seen on her face since she'd arrived, and was asleep long before they jumped into hyperspace.

[OOC: NFI, NFB, OOC-okay, and DONE! My apologies for spamming you all with this the past few days, but it was fun to put together. For the last time, contains a nod to Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes, and dialogue and adapted narrative from Rebel Stand by Aaron Allston, with some tweaks by me and great POV-rewriting justice. Many, many thanks to