nonelikemesince

An interesting side effect of rebuilding his lightsaber with the lambent crystal: where the Yuuzhan Vong had been a blank spot to him before, Anakin could sense them -- through the lambent, though, not the Force. It wasn't anywhere near as clear or complete as his Force perceptions, but he still felt like he understood the Yuuzhan Vong on an entirely new level.

In less reassuring developments, his sense of the Yuuzhan Vong was clearer than Tahiri's Force presence was now, and Anakin had to strain to figure out where she was. Interestingly, the cell where she was being held wasn't (according to Rapuung) where the shaping compound's laboratories would be, but close to the personal quarters of the shaper, Mezhan Kwaad, who just happened to be the one who'd infected Rapuung with the same affliction as the Shamed Ones and on whom Rapuung wanted revenge.

It was all too convenient, really.

Anakin was surprised when they encountered a group of shapers in the corridor and didn't get attacked -- at least until the corridor started contracting around them.

"We have seconds. Do not inhale," Rapuung warned him as the walls started exuding some kind of mist. Great, toxic gas. Luckily, Anakin's lightsaber cut through the walls just fine, but he could live with never again having to watch the walls actually flinch while he carved an exit through them. Aside from the damutek's natural defenses, they didn't meet any armed resistance; warriors weren't allowed in the shaper compound except by express invitation, which meant that . . . well, Anakin and Rapuung had a few minutes before they would have armed resistance to contend with. That was enough time to find another shaper and make him lead them to Mezhan Kwaad's quarters.

Neither of them expected there to be warriors on the other side of the door. It was an easy enough fight now that Anakin had some way to sense his opponents (except for the several seconds he was unconscious after being choked by an amphistaff), but . . .

This was the place he'd seen, where they'd been holding Tahiri. Now that he saw it in person, it was more repulsive than he'd realized, because most laboratories didn't have walls covered with what looked like internal organs that moved and made noise.

"If they are here without the permission of the shapers," Rapuung said when Anakin expressed his suspicion at the warriors' presence, "it could mean they've come to arrest a shaper or to take something from them."

"Can they do that?" asked Anakin dubiously, and got a mocking laugh from Rapuung.

"You know too little of our ways, infidel, and too little about Mezhan Kwaad."

"But what -- Tahiri!"

Anakin sensed something behind him and spun to see a section of the wall suddenly go transparent, and beyond the membrane a flash of yellow hair in the middle of about a dozen Yuuzhan Vong warriors.

He and Rapuung charged straight into the middle of the group, but despite their determination these warriors were prepared for an attack and forced them back toward the laboratory. Anakin could see another group of warriors escorting Tahiri and a couple of shapers he didn't recognize toward the exit, and tried to Force-leap over the entire group only to get yanked unceremoniously back to the ground by an amphistaff around his ankle.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back on the ground, trying to blink spots out of his vision with Rapuung standing over him, glaring at the warriors.

"You, Tolok Naap. You fought beside me only a few tens of cycles ago," Rapuung challenged one of the warriors. "You believe me cursed by the gods?"

It was a different warrior who responded, "Whatever you were, whether you are cursed or not, you have clearly gone mad. You fight with an infidel against your own kind."

"I seek my vengeance. Mezhan Kwaad. Where is she going?" Rapuung demanded.

"The shaper master has been taken up for her trials," the warrior answered. "The accusation is heresy."

"They're taking her outsystem?"

"I do not know."

Anakin listened with growing frustration while Rapuung challenged the warriors to combat in melodramatic, posturing rhetoric that made it clear he intended to prove that despite his appearance he hadn't fallen out of the gods' favor. Rapuung glared at him and told him to stand down, at which point he burst out angrily, "I have no time for games! Tahiri --"

Rapuung cut him off. "Is with the object of my vengeance. If we lose the one, we lose the other. I will make it swift."

He hadn't exaggerated. It took less than a minute and a half before the only beings alive in the room were the two of them.

"When we have Mezhan Kwaad, you must keep death from my back until I have forced her to speak. That is why I need you," Rapuung told him.

Anakin nodded. "I can do that."

"Swear it. Swear it by this Force you worship. Keep death from my back until she speaks, for no less a time and no longer."

"I swear it, if we ever get that close, that is. How long before reinforcements arrive?" asked Anakin.

"Not long."

Well then. No more skulking in corridors; Anakin sliced a hole in the ceiling with his lightsaber, and they climbed up to the roof of the compound.

Tahiri? Anakin tried, reaching out to her in the Force, but she rejected the contact. He tried again. Tahiri. You know me. You're my best friend. Please.

She didn't reject him that time, at least; it was the Force equivalent of her pausing mid-stride and looking back at him . . . and giving him the impression of several coralskippers and larger ship analogs. "Sithspawn, they're going to board a ship!"

"No, they are not," Rapuung growled, leaping down off the roof with Anakin right behind him.

They made their way as quickly as they could without being seen, about a hundred meters from the shaper damutek to the transport damutek; when they got close enough to see Tahiri and the warriors ascending the ramp into one of the ships, they broke out into a run.

Straight into a barrage of thud bugs that the warriors started hurling at them.

Anakin managed to bat most of them aside with his lightsaber, but one went through his thigh and sent him to one knee. Rapuung, who had refused to pick up a weapon until he'd restored his honor, was not so lucky and fell to the ramp with a wet, sickening noise.

"Stop, Jeedai," the commander ordered; Anakin looked up to see him standing beside Tahiri with one end of his amphistaff coiled around her neck, the three surviving warriors positioned to guard him.

Anakin's stomach felt cold and heavy. "Tahiri!"

"That isn't my name." She looked at him, but there was no recognition in her eyes. "I am Riina Kwaad."

"Whatever they've done to you, I know you remember me," Anakin insisted.

One of the shapers cut in, ""You may be a part of the infidel lies implanted in her, but you are no more than that."

Anakin wasn't surprised when the commander threatened to kill Tahiri if he made a single threatening move -- he didn't like it at all, but he wasn't surprised. He was more than willing to offer himself in exchange for Tahiri when he learned that the commander knew exactly who he was, but that, it seemed, wasn't an option. The Yuuzhan Vong had no intention of letting her go.

He was trying to fight back panic and think when he saw Vua Rapuung stand, one fist shoved into a gaping hole in his stomach where a thud bug had struck him, and demand, "Jeedai, remember your oath to me."

Of course. He'd promised to help make sure that Rapuung got his chance to confront Mezhan Kwaad and get the truth out of her, help him restore his honor. He had no desire to betray Rapuung, but if he kept his promise it could very well be the perceived threat that would doom Tahiri.

"I remember my oath," he said, his mouth dry. "Which one is she?"

"The female with the eight-fingered hand," Rapuung replied.

Anakin swallowed, hard, and it hurt, but he looked squarely at the commander. "All right, this one thing, then, if you want me alive. It will cost you nothing. Compel the shaper named Mezhan Kwaad to speak the truth."

The commander didn't know what he was after, going by his dubious expression. "About what?"

Anakin let his gaze flick over to Tahiri for a split second, about as long as he dared. "The questions Vua Rapuung will put to her."

"I see no Vua Rapuung. Only a Shamed One who does not know his place," scoffed the commander.

"It is not I who am shamed!" Rapuung countered. "Do as the infidel says, and know the truth!"

Mezhan Kwaad finally spoke up. "There is no sense in listening to any demented lies from this one! He fights by the side of a Jeedai infidel. What more need be said?"

Interesting timing, Anakin thought, considering the crowd rapidly gathering in the square below them.

Someone -- Anakin recognized him as Vua Rapuung's brother, whom they'd encountered him when they first infiltrated the compound -- yelled from the crowd: "Do you fear the truth, Mezhan Kwaad? If he is mad, then compelling you to speak will do you no harm. How many of you fought with him?" There was a murmur building in the crowd, and even if Anakin couldn't get the sense of it in the Force it sounded like they were on Rapuung's side. "Who ever questioned the courage of Vua Rapuung? Who ever doubted the gods loved him?"

"He is self-evidently pronounced mad by his behavior," the commander spoke up, eyeing Mezhan Kwaad suspiciously. "However, having found one treachery in Mezhan Kwaad -- the treachery of heresy -- I see no reason to doubt she is capable of others. Master Mezhan Kwaad, I compel you to answer truthfully whatever questions the Shamed One once known in Domain Rapuung puts to you. Your truthfulness will not rest on your honor, but on the truthhearer I procured for your questioning in the other matter."

Mezhan Kwaad retorted, "I will not submit to any such indignity!"

"You do not have the right to refuse, and your domain will pay the full price if you attempt to," the commander replied. "Answer his questions and let us end this."

Yes, Anakin thought, please let this end soon.

"Ask your questions, Shamed One," Mezhan Kwaad answered, looking at Vua Rapuung with an odd expression.

It was only one question. "Mezhan Kwaad. Did you intentionally rob me of my implants, ruin my scars, give me the appearance of being Shamed?" Rapuung demanded. "Did you do these things to me, or did the gods?"

"There are no gods," Mezhan Kwaad answered after a long silence. "This miserable thing you are is what I made of you."

As chaos erupted in the crowd below, Mezhan Kwaad's eight-fingered shaper's hand flicked out, its fingers stretching out into impossibly long points that impaled the commander and his warriors through their skulls. Anakin started to make a move, felt one of those fingers pierce through his forearm and wrap around it to cut off his bloodflow, and fell bonelessly to the ramp when pain seared through his entire body. He heard his lightsaber clatter to the ramp and saw Rapuung collapse beside him, coughing up blood.

He couldn't move; neither of them could. The crowd was starting to surge up the ramp toward Mezhan Kwaad and her apprentice shaper, but froze when she held up a small nut-shaped vial.

"This is huun," she called out to them in warning. "It releases a nerve toxin sufficient to kill each and every one of you. I am immune to its effects. Your deaths will be useless; they will not serve the Yuuzhan Vong. Commander Vootuh and these others are the real traitors. I am Mezhan Kwaad, and I answer only to Supreme Overlord Shimrra. When he hears of these incidents, he will set things right. In the meantime, I will take this ship, to better defend myself. I do not wish to harm my fellow Yuuzhan Vong. I will do so only if I must. Nen Yim," she added as she turned to her apprentice, indicating Anakin and Rapuung, "drag those two on board."

The shaper called Nen Yim took a step toward Anakin but froze, looking at something behind Anakin; whatever it was, Mezhan Kwaad saw it too, and took it as a sign to subject Anakin to another jolt of excruciating pain. Then another, and a third, frantic, as if whatever had her attention would stop if she tortured him for long enough.

It wasn't until he heard the familiar snap-hiss of his lightsaber powering up that he realized what she was looking at, and not until he saw the blade slash cleanly through Mezhan Kwaad's neck to send her head rolling down the ramp that he understood why.

He managed to raise his eyes enough to see Tahiri standing in front of him, holding the still-ignited lightsaber . . . and smiling down at Mezhan Kwaad's body. It was the same cold and twisted smile he'd seen in his vision of her as a Dark-Side Force-wielder.

"My friend. My best friend. You left me," she said in a soft but somehow wrong voice that sent chills down his spine; her voice, like her eyes, was completely devoid of humor, enthusiasm, everything that he knew and loved about her. She let the lightsaber blade drop so that he could feel the pulse of energy microns away from his face.

"I've been trying to find you, this whole time," he tried, even if it hurt to talk right now.

"You aren't real," she insisted. "None of this is. You're a lie."

She twitched the lightsaber just enough to shear off a lock of his hair, but it was the accusation that hurt, as did the confusion and pain he could read in her face. "It's not a lie, Tahiri -- you're my best friend. I love you. I love you." It surprised Anakin just how much he meant it, even if he wasn't sure why it was such a surprise.

It might have been a split second, but it felt like a lot longer by the time Tahiri blinked, hard, and looked at him with an expression close to being the familiar one he remembered. "Anakin, are you really . . ." That was when she realized there was still a crowd of angry warriors charging up the ramp. Sounding much more like herself again she concluded, "Well, this doesn't look good."

"We have to get out of here," Anakin agreed. With Mezhan Kwaad gone, he and Tahiri were the natural new target for their rage.

"And this is your plan?" she asked, almost but not quite the same old Tahiri.

"Hey, I'm doing my best! I'll hold 'em off, you run into the ship."

Tahiri hesitated, then curled her fingers a little more tightly around the hilt of his lightsaber as some of that cold, alien expression returned to her face. "I don't care about dying, Anakin, not after what they did to me. Let's just take as many of them with us as we can."

Oh, that wasn't a good sign. Anakin reached a hand out toward his lightsaber and asked as gently as he could, "Can I have that back?"

"Sure," she said, shrugging, after a very long moment in which he'd thought she'd refuse. "It's your blade. I lost mine."

He took the lightsaber from her, winced when the movement aggravated his injured arm, and turned to face the oncoming charge.

And heard Vua Rapuung, who by all rights should be too injured to stand any more, get to his feet, take an amphistaff from one of the dead guards, and declare, ""No. While I live, none of you shall fight the Jeedai."

Anakin tried to object, but Rapuung wouldn't let him. "I will die soon. I am able to give you only a small chance. Take it. Now." He raised the amphistaff and leapt toward the crowd of warriors, shouting, "A salute to the Jeedai! A salute of blood!"

Someone was sacrificing his life to give Anakin a chance to get away. Again. Like Chewie, like Master Ikrit. He could stop it, though, and it wouldn't be like the other times, he just --

Had to get Tahiri out of here, he realized, numbly, and followed her up the ramp into the safety of the ship.

[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay etc., still adapted from Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes. Almost done with this one, I promise. Warning for fighty violence under the cut, and TBC.]