nonelikemesince

Anakin wasn't proud of the way he'd lost his composure and yelled at Sannah and Valin, letting them blame themselves for the mess they were in. He wasn't, in retrospect, terribly proud of how he'd threatened the hostage captain of their ship, hinting none too subtly that he could use the Force to make Vehn tell him what he wanted to know. It was just that now that they'd crashed the ship, he had a hostage to keep in line and the lives of two young Jedi trainees who looked up to him to protect. ("We want to be like you, Anakin. We all do, and you would never run from a fight," Valin had said, so this really was all his fault and it made him feel sick.) With the Temple abandoned -- and Anakin remembered witnessing Cade's memory of another Jedi Praxeum sometime in the future as it fell to invaders, which only made it worse -- the planet had quickly been overrun by Yuuzhan Vong, who'd wasted no time starting to re-shape the planet for their own habitation.

This wasn't Sannah's fault, or Valin's, or Tahiri's. People liked to portray him as the next Luke Skywalker, and he'd gone along with it. He liked it, if he was honest, because he liked playing the hero, but as the reality of those expectations began to outweigh the fantasy version he'd grown up entertaining, the weight of them had built to the point of being more of a burden than he'd realized . . . or, more accurately, been willing to share with anyone not from Fandom.

Really, the only things keeping him from breaking down under the weight of them now were the knowledge that Sannah and Valin were counting on him and, more importantly, the faint but still there sense of Tahiri's Force presence, on the other side of the moon. How he'd get there, he had no idea -- he had the wreckage of Vehn's ship, plus two others, and several days ago he'd successfully assembled a makeshift speeder from some of the ship components, but putting something big enough to transport four together from the pieces was going to be tough and time-consuming, even if Fiver and his X-Wing had miraculously survived being a diversion and it meant he'd have his astromech to help.

The dream nearly broke him, though. It was hardly the first time he'd had it in some form, since it had basically stuck with him since childhood, but this time it wasn't himself in Darth Vader's outfit, the same one he'd seen so recently on his grandfather, that he saw standing in the middle of the darkness.

It was a young woman, Yuuzhan Vong but wielding a lightsaber and commanding Dark-Side Force powers -- and for the first time Anakin really understood what, exactly, the pollen that had affected Fandom those couple of times did. Looking at her in the dream was like picking up on the entire island's emotions and sensations that week with the full scope of his Force senses.

"The last of your kind. The last of my kind," she whispered in a voice he barely even recognized -- but when she raised the lightsaber he knew exactly who she was.

"Tahiri!" He was frozen in horror at the maniacal but somehow agonized look on her face as her lightsaber blade swept toward him, but woken forcibly from sleep just before it cut him down.

Finding Qorl, the former TIE pilot turned hermit who'd run into Jaina and Jacen years ago while they were students here, was an amazing stroke of luck: he felt he could trust the man enough to leave Sannah and Valin in his care, plus keep a tight leash on Vehn. Talon Karrde should be here by now to evacuate the rest of the students; it was just a matter of tracking him down.

Well, maybe it wasn't trust. It was just a risk he felt he could take, because he was not failing Tahiri the way he had Chewie, Master Ikrit, everyone at Centerpoint, Daeshara'cor, or anyone since this whole war had started that he hadn't been able to save sometimes by just not being here. So, after explaining the situation to the kids, he took his makeshift speeder and started back toward the other side of the moon.

[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, etc. Still adapted from Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes, but without any of his ridiculously over-the-top descriptions of people's eye color. TBC, naturally.]