nonelikemesince

Escaping the Peace Brigade and finding Master Ikrit, Sannah, and Valin had been the easy part. Sending Fiver, the astromech he'd spent so much time working on, to pilot his X-Wing on a likely final decoy flight had been hard.

It was all a breeze compared with the conversation he'd ended up having with Tahiri while they waited for nightfall to commandeer the Peace Brigade ship they'd picked out. First she'd laid into him for never bothering to stay in touch, and how he must treat the rest of his friends horribly if he treated his best friend like this. (Anakin wondered uneasily if he'd ever even bothered to get to know anyone in Fandom well enough to consider a friend, and then wished he'd listened to Jaina and the other Tahiri and made a better effort to talk to her.) Then she'd read him the riot act for keeping everyone at arm's length and keeping his problems to himself so he could pretend he was over them, and topped it all off by getting so upset she cried herself to sleep against his shoulder.

Which left Anakin alone with an increasingly numb arm and the realization that he wasn't really sure what they were any more. Best friends, yes, that wasn't even a question, but -- he really didn't know. Whatever it was, it was comfortingly familiar and yet terrifying.

Stealing the ship was easy enough, not that Anakin would admit to taking any kind of visceral satisfaction in fastening the handcuffs on the mouthy captain a little extra tightly -- though he did regret gagging Vehn once he flew the ship into the network of tunnels and heard a horrible metallic screech. He'd completely forgotten to retract the landing ramp after they'd gotten Ikrit and the kids on board, and it had just jammed itself into a permanently open position.

"Anakin, I think we may have trouble," Tahiri warned.

He didn't need to hear that right now, not when he was concentrating on trying to get them out of there and his stupidity with the landing ramp was already bothering him. "We'll make it," he said. "We'll figure out what to do about the ramp later."

Tahiri pointed to the cave mouth up ahead, where they should have seen the early morning sunlight.

"Sithspawn!" Anakin blurted out. "They've moved one of the big freighters over the hole."

Master Ikrit spoke up, his calm voice in stark contrast to Anakin's increasing panic. "Continue."

He started to argue, but he knew better, even though he did protest that Ikrit, diminutive being that he was, should strap in. What was important was that Master Ikrit was using the Force to push the freighter out of the way, and they were still on course.

But trapped -- they were barely out of the tunnels before the entire Peace Brigade fleet was closing in around the ship, and ground troops were visible below.

"Help Master Ikrit. Push the freighter up farther!" Anakin yelled back to Tahiri and the two younger students.

Then Valin replied, "Master Ikrit's gone, Anakin. He jumped out of the hatch," and Anakin's stomach twisted horribly.

But the tiny, pacifist Kushiban Jedi Master kept walking toward the ships that were moving, clearing a path for them, through a barrage of blaster bolts.

When the first bolt struck Ikrit, Anakin felt it -- then the second and third, and as Ikrit's presence in the Force started to fade he knew they only had seconds to get out before the opening closed back up. Just like Sernpidal all over again. Only the second he'd squeezed the ship through the opening, he turned to see Tahiri leaping through the open hatch with an incoherent Tusken growl of grief and anger, and igniting her lightsaber as she ran to retrieve Master Ikrit.

Yelling desperately for Valin or Sannah to get to the laser turret, Anakin opened fire on the blockade of ships with the forward guns only to have the shields completely fail after a particularly heavy barrage of blasterfire.

He had to get out of there. Valin and Sannah were not going to die because of him. But he could feel Tahiri's presence on the surface below -- he always felt her presence, stronger and more distinct than anyone else's in his Force-sense. He could sense Master Ikrit as well, but his old teacher's Force presence was fading. The moment it blinked out Anakin felt it, and his wordless but unmistakable final message: Remember, together you and Tahiri are stronger than the sum of your parts. I love you. Goodbye.

Sannah had gotten to the turbolaser and started firing, but the ship's engines were failing. He had just enough power left to get them out to upper atmosphere, and Anakin fought back tears as he hauled back on the throttle. For every meter they gained in altitude, he could feel Tahiri's presence dwindling.

"I'll be back, Tahiri," he said softly, through clenched teeth; he'd seized onto what little he could still sense of her in the Force and singlemindedly focused on it just to keep himself from breaking down. "That I swear, I'll be back."

[OOC: NFI/NFB, OOC okay, also adapted from Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes. Any claims that I didn't get a little teary writing this are damned lies. TBC, of course.]