nonelikemesince

Anakin needed a healing trance. Even a few minutes to stop and rest so the constant footsteps weren't jarring the gaping hole in his abdomen would have been nice, but the lambent in his lightsaber told him that Nom Anor and his pursuit party were right on their heels. Stopping even for a moment would lose them precious distance, and he wasn't going to be the cause of yet another downtick in their probability of survival. He'd messed up enough already, and Ulaha, Jovan, and Eryl had paid the price. He could have planned better. He should have known to keep a keen eye out for the sneaky backhanded tactics Nom Anor was known for, once they realized he was involved. But no, he hadn't thought about that, and led them right into trap after trap.

A finger flicked him behind the ear, hard, and Jaina ordered, "Stop that."

"What?" he asked, and winced when the question distracted him from using the Force to keep most of the agonizing pain at bay. "And thanks for caring."

"You can feel sorry for yourself," Jaina told him, though her tone was too mild to be lecturing. "You were reckless, Anakin, and you paid the price -- and that's not the point. You need to stop blaming yourself."

"Who should I blame?" he asked, and drew on the Force for a little more strength when he heard their pursuers in the passage behind them.

"The war. Do you think Uncle Luke sent us here to train? This is important. If people die, people die."

"That's a little cold," Anakin said, but it didn't surprise him the way it might have if he hadn't gotten a very good glimpse at the kind of person she'd grow up to be. (He refused to entertain the idea that it was the only glimpse he was going to get.)

"I'll cry at home," replied Jaina, always the practical one. "Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you didn't. But start focusing on the mission, or more people will die."

The sound of footsteps got louder, and there was no time to ask any more questions, or focus on anything other than running. If he focused on the act of putting one foot in front of the other as fast as he could, he didn't have time to think about how much each step hurt . . . except that after a while even his best Force-bolstered defenses could mitigate the pain, and he could no longer ignore how he was burning up with a fever or how much work it took just to breathe.

It was bad. He could tell something had ruptured even before he reached down to touch the bandage and see a bright red layer of blood coating his hand when he pulled it away.

"Anakin. What's that?" Tahiri hadn't left his side for a minute since he'd gotten hurt, so of course she noticed.

"Nothing," he said through his teeth, trying -- while he ran -- to concentrate on the right healing techniques to seal up the tear. When he stumbled, he knew he didn't have the energy left to maintain that kind of concentration. Definitely a bad sign. Then he was floating in an invisible Force grip while Tahiri yelled for Tekli.

To Anakin's horror, the entire team slowed to a stop. "I'm fine," he protested, not wanting them to lose a second. "It's okay, we have to keep moving."

"Neg that!" Tahiri snapped. "You're not all right, not even close."

He heard Jaina yell an order to keep him levitated and was vaguely aware of bobbing oddly along the passage with tiny Tekli sitting on his legs as the team continued to run. He could feel her infusing his wound with the Force . . . except he just kept getting weaker.

Alema and the Barabels disappeared back down the passage with a half dozen concussion grenades in some kind of attempt to buy them time -- fifteen minutes, maybe, hopefully enough time for Tekli to get a good look at . . . something? He couldn't really make out what everyone was saying now, and what he could hear was muffled and distant-sounding. The only thing he was really aware of was Tahiri beside him, constantly repeating reassurances. Wasn't he supposed to talk to her? There was some kind of conversation they'd promised to have, something about . . .

Whatever it was, he couldn't remember when Tekli started digging around inside the hole in his gut and he blacked out from the pain.

He came to when he heard blasterfire, and tried to sit up only to have Jacen push him back down. "Don't worry. Everyone's well covered."

"Alema -- hurt?" he asked in a clumsy, dry-mouthed rasp. He thought he'd seen her take a couple of thud bugs in the back, but maybe he hadn't really seen that. He couldn't be sure.

"Angry," Jacen said. "Already blasting Yuuzhan Vong, and loving it."

"Good reason!" Why was he being defensive about this now?

"Easy! I wasn't being judgmental!" Jacen defended himself. Anakin gave him a skeptical look, the only thing he could manage when he was gritting his teeth against the extremely unsettling sensation of Tekli putting stitches into one of his internal organs. "Really, I'm not."

More blasterfire, then a jubilant Wookiee roar, and silence.

"Am I worried about what's happening to us?" Jacen asked, grimacing as he glanced back up the passageway, clearly unsettled by Lowie's reaction to yet another voxyn kill. "Sure. This war is bringing out all that's selfish and wicked in the New Republic, corrupting the galaxy star by star. I see it pulling one Jedi after another to the dark side, making us fight to win instead of protect. But I can't push others down my path. Everyone needs to choose for themselves. Centerpoint taught me that much."

"Fooled me." Anakin didn't have the strength to be as derisive as he could have been, which was probably just as well.

"Fooled myself," Jacen told him earnestly. "I thought I was the only one who knows the difference between right and wrong. I realized that wasn't true. Actually, Tenel Ka pointed it out after what I said on the Exquisite Death. I've been trying to apologize to you since."

. . . oh. So that was it. Every time Anakin had brushed him off, assuming he was just going to offer more irritating, know-it-all advice . . .

"Really? Didn't --" He sucked in a sharp breath at the twinge of pain when Tekli brushed a hand against some extremely sensitive interal organ. " -- know."

"I figured," Jacen said, grinning at him.

Tekli did everything she could, but she confirmed his suspicions by telling him the amphistaff had punctured his spleen, and he knew what he really needed was a healing trance. He also knew he couldn't go into one, because what little time Alema had bought them was up, and he wasn't going to slow them down any more. They kept running, Jacen and Tahiri keeping Anakin levitated after one attempt just to stand up dropped him to the ground screaming in agony.

The pain had him drifting in and out until another stab of pain, equally intense but distinctly not his and laced heavily with grief, came through the meld and jolted him back to consciousness.

Bela, now, and he'd been too wrapped up in his own pain to notice until it was too late.

***

They lost Krasov next, while they were driving back yet another pack of voxyn. The acidic saliva was eating its way through her head when she took a thermal detonator from their dwindling supply and asked permission to cover their departure. Raynar, suffering from the hallucinogenic side effects of an antivenom treatment sustained severe injuries when he provoked a voxyn into attack in a delusional fit. Tekli believed he would live, at least, assuming the experimental treatments Cilghal had formulated did their job.

Maybe it was the pain, or maybe he'd finally gotten the hang of it, but Anakin didn't feel the same crushing guilt over Raynar that he had over Ulaha, Eryl, Jovan, Bela, and Krasov; for the first time, he was oddly at peace with the choice he'd made -- and they'd made it through the voxyn warrens.

When they eventually stumbled across a makeshift hold jammed full of captured machinery, including a light freighter, he allowed himself to think that maybe, finally, the Force was on their side again -- until Lomi used a subtle Nightsister Force trick to conveniently make them forget her and Welk, then stole the ship so they could make their own escape with Raynar aboard. They hadn't felt him die; there was still hope that he'd survive.

But without a certain means of escape, Anakin knew -- and the rest of the team was beginning to realize -- that his own chances were dwindling away to nothing. Tesar had been sharing strength with him through the Force like he'd done with Ulaha aboard the Exquisite Death, but its effectiveness was wearing off. They'd been ready to mount their last assault on the voxyn queen, then break straight for the Tachyon Flier and get home. But what were the odds of them finding another ship again right away?

"Anakin, I'm sorry," Ganner said, voicing what no one else had the nerve to say. "Once we found out they were Dark Jedi, we should never have --"

"Yes, we should have. Without them, we wouldn't have made it this far," Anakin answered, feeling calmer and more focused than he had since before the mission began, completely sure of what he was saying. Dark Side techniques or not, Welk had saved his life while they fought their way through an old abandoned Yuuzhan Vong arena. "And I would have died back there anyway."

"No. Not 'anyway.'" Tahiri gripped his hand and gave him a stern look. "We'll find another way off this rock."

He smiled faintly and squeezed her hand. "First things first. Let's concentrate on the mission." He ducked his head over his comlink, trying to contact Lowie, but no luck. "If he'd been killed, I'm sure we would have felt him die," he said . . . and looked up to see Jaina and Jacen fighting back tears, Tahiri wiping hers away, and the rest of the team looking at him somberly.

They knew, but they weren't as ready to accept it.

Anakin picked up the long-range blaster and began to check it over. Still in that same calm voice, he told the others, "We'd better do this now."

***

When they were in position just outside the shaper grashal where the voxyn queen was being kept and Jacen re-established the battle-meld, it felt more cohesive than it had since the beginning of the mission. Armed with the blaster that had been Raynar's, Anakin hung back with half the team while the other half made the initial charge, flushing the guards out into the open where Alema and Tesar could pick them off with the high-powered weapons.

When Anakin's group made its run toward the grashal, he found he didn't have the strength to keep pace, and when they noticed, Jaina, Tahiri, and Tesar hung back with him.

"Go!" Anakin ordered them. "I'll catch up."

Tahiri's eyes flashed with defiance. "When Jawas swim!"

"Anakin, you're in no condition," Jaina put in. "Go back to the equipment pit and locate Lowie. Maybe if you find a safe place to hole up and go into a healing trance --"

"Too late for that," Anakin said with a tiny lopsided grin. "I'm seeing this through."

"Even if it means putting others at risk? If you're slow, you're a danger to us all. At least try a trance," Jaina pleaded.

It was too late for that, and Anakin knew it. Tekli had done everything she could, but the only way he could have stopped the internal bleeding would have been for him to go into a healing trance hours ago. He probably wouldn't even survive trying to get somewhere quiet enough to go into one now. The question was just this: would he be too much of a danger to them? He reached into the Force, and it answered him more clearly than it ever had. "I'm going."

This wasn't about atoning for all the deaths he felt responsible for any more, or trying to prove anything.

"I thought so," Jaina said, all she could manage before she had to look away.

They kept advancing. Both groups had just breached the grashal when they felt a tremor in the Force -- Raynar? It might be.

"They'll pay," said Jaina, who looked older and more worn down than even the older version of her he'd known. "They will pay."

"Then so will we," Anakin answered. She was normally the most levelheaded of all of them, but as worn down as she was and as oddly serene as Anakin felt, he decided it was his job to make sure she didn't lose her cool. At least he'd get to do that this once. "We're here to destroy the queen, not take revenge."

"Right," Jaina said. "Revenge comes later." She stepped into the grashal with Anakin right behind her.

It was so dark inside that they were temporarily blinded by their own blasterfire, swarmed by warriors with amphistaffs and razor bugs; what Anakin could sense of them through his lightsaber's lambent was an angry, crackling mass of static. With all the discord in the meld and his own mounting stress levels, he hadn't been able to fall into the flow of the Force deeply enough for a successful battle-meditation state at any point on this mission, but now he slipped into it more easily than ever. He didn't even realize what he was doing until after he'd done it: ducking amphistaff blows, snapping off blaster shots, dodging hurled razor bugs, detonating incendiary grenades in the air to blind the enemy.

He was lying on his back, having just dropped to avoid a razor bug, when the depletion alarm on his blaster went off; he tossed it aside and thumbed his lightsaber on. He finished off his opponent so quickly that it caught him off guard, and he lay there for several moments until he was able to get his breathing under control. If not for the strength Tesar was sharing with him through the meld and what he could draw on through the Force to sustain himself, there would have been absolutely no way he'd even be moving right now, much less getting back to his feet: the pain was excruciating.

He felt it in the meld, the strike team's growing sense of relief and excitement: finally the Force was on their side. He reached out through the lambent, as well, to find the voxyn queen, and sensed how nearby her fear was. They could do this.

Then he heard the roar of a longblaster and saw Tahiri rushing toward him only to get knocked flat by an explosion in the passage behind her. He started toward her, but she scrambled back to her feet and yelled, "Magma spitters! We're cut off!"

"Tekli?" he asked, and even speaking ignited fresh bursts of pain in his gut. No point in trying to see what she meant; the safety of the rest of the team was his top priority now. Tahiri pointed behind him, to where the tiny Chadra-Fan healer was trying to revive an unconscious Tesar.

"Take him and go," Anakin told her, grimacing with the effort it took just to say every word. "You may need to cut a way out."

Tahiri's eyes narrowed. "'You?' I'm not going to --"

Leave him. He knew what she was going to say, not through the meld but through the unique Force connection the two of them had always had. "Do it," he half-snarled, and immediately regretted it at the look on her face. Of course she wouldn't; it would take an entire fleet of capital ships to pry her away from him unless she wanted to, and that was one of the things he'd always -- that was what he'd been meaning to say.

"You need to help Tekli," he said more gently. "I'll --"

He couldn't lie to her.

"Yes, Tahiri," Tekli interjected, and Anakin gave her a grateful look. "Tesar is not responding. I cannot move him and work on him both."

Tahiri looked between Anakin and Tekli for a moment, indecision and heartbreak written all over her face. Finally she nodded and moved toward Anakin, reached up to put her arms around his neck and stretched up to kiss him. Then she pulled back, shaking her head.

"No. For that, you have to come back," she told him.

Better tell her, flyboy, understand? he heard in his head, in the older Tahiri's voice.

Then the older Jaina, from the last talk they'd had on the beach in Fandom: There's always something going on, and it's easier to put things off for whatever reason. But when you do that, you miss out on a lot.

He'd missed out on enough already.

"Tahiri --" He reached out to grab her by the hand and pull her back into his arms, and he didn't care how much it hurt when he leaned down to kiss her. He felt her shock, the moment of resistance before she gave in and accepted what it meant; he opened up to her in the Force to let her feel just how much he loved her, how proud he was of her, and felt her return the emotion with equal ferocity.

I need you to do something for me, he told her through the Force. Take care of Ben for me, will you? Don't let him grow up with the same kind of pressure I did. And tell him, someday, that I'm proud of him.

"Promise," Tahiri said out loud, blinking away tears as she let go and turned to help Tekli. "May the Force be with you, Anakin."

He watched her go and then turned back to the battle. He just had to buy the rest of them enough time to get to the queen and then get out . . . and he sensed a massive enemy presence coming toward them. Forcing his legs to move as fast as they could -- not nearly fast enough -- he retrieved a fallen blaster and set off back toward the ambush site, pausing long enough to warn the rest of the team that they had a Yuuzhan Vong impostor on the loose.

The force that came pouring into the grashal was no less than 40 warriors strong.

Anakin thought of Tahiri, Jaina, Jacen, his parents, Ben and his grandfather, the older Jaina and Tahiri, the younger Leia, Ender, even Cade, and his friends and comrades here and in Fandom -- drawing on everything he felt for them, he opened himself up and let the Force flow into him unchecked.

He was running at full speed, firing blaster bolts that always struck a target at an impossibly fast rate, but he couldn't feel the pain any more even though his entire body glowed faintly from the raw power that was beginning to burn his cells out. There was nothing but the power of the Force, a keen awareness of everyone in his life who had ever mattered to him, and, amidst the maelstrom, a profound sense of peace.

"Hutt breath!" Jaina shouted over the comm. "The queen's escaping."

"The impostor must have opened an escape tunnel," he answered in a voice that was steady for the first time since he'd been hurt. Raw Force power continued to flow into him, and he was all but on fire now. "Jacen, you're in charge. Take everyone and go after her."

If Jaina was surprised or angry about his choice, she didn't let it show. "Can't get there, Little Brother!"

"The path will clear," he promised, and charged alone into the ranks of Yuuzhan Vong.

The jumpsuit was burning off his body now, and raw Force energy crackled off his arms and legs like lightning. He heard Jaina cry out his name and sent her a sharp telepathic command: Go. She's getting away! When the blaster's depletion alarm sounded he threw it away and ignited his lightsaber, but the brightness of its blade was dim compared to the glow of the energy now burning its way out of him.

He kept fighting, kept drawing the warriors toward him, didn't care about the amphistaff blows and razor bugs that slashed open new wounds. Somewhere nearby blasterfire kept pouring down, as if they were still trying to save him.

Go! he sent to Jaina again as the aura surrounding him began to flicker. I can't hold!

He realized he was in a work area near the queen's pen and it hit him: the impostor was trying to escape with enough tissue to clone probably a million more voxyn, and he was not going to let them all have risked everything and sacrificed so much for a futile cause. The light of his aura flickered rapidly as his own body began to disintegrate from the intensity of the Force energy.

There was one last thermal detonator on his belt; he unhooked it and set the timer to 30 seconds.

Jaina's voice over the comm was desperate. "Anakin, I can't!"

He turned so he could see her and Jacen, raised the detonator, and released the trigger. The 30 seconds began ticking down, and he hurled the detonator toward the impostor -- it was Nom Anor, Anakin recognized him now -- just as the surviving warriors converged on him again.

Another amphistaff to the midsection knocked him sprawling and he dropped his lightsaber; his aura kept flickering, but the light dimmed rapidly and occasionally blinked out. He was fading out, melting into the Force, and no longer capable of getting back up, even though he could just barely see Nom Anor moving to get rid of the detonator.

At the very last possible moment, just when Nom Anor was about to pick it up, Anakin mustered a final burst of telekinetic energy and pushed the detonator toward the cargo pod.

He knew with a profound conviction that they'd accomplished what they set out to do, but he didn't have a chance to realize that the knowledge came from complete unity with the Force; he was gone long before the explosion went off.

[OOC: And this is it, folks, the end of Anakin's story. For the last time, this was adapted from Star by Star by Troy Denning. NFI/NFB, and OOC okay.

Content warning for lots of violence, semi-graphic descriptions of injuries, NPC death, and character death.

If anyone wants to find out about Anakin's death, I am leaving that up to the discretion of his in-game relatives. I just ask that any conversations about it remain NFB, please, so it can be avoided as needed.]