all i hear are screams (every time i dare to close my eyes)
the thrill of blood comes instantly (there’s only darkness at the finish): chapter 2
read on ao3 along with my main ikio'yth au
tumblr masterlist | one | two | three
cw: canon-typical death & violence, Anakin Skywalker's Tusken Massacre
🌊 30007 AF| Vodran
Tavi has always walked the line between Light and Dark like a tightrope. She is young, still, but her memories span centuries. From the safety of xir egg, xie has felt empires rise and fall. She has felt Light and Darkness come and go, give and take; has heard entire societies slaughtered, has seen new ones rise from the ashes. In the years since xir first Master’s death, xie has become used to the shadow festering at the edge of xir consciousness. Has learned to bide her time, to hold her tongue, to be ready – but waiting.
None of this stops the wave of Darkness, so familiar and so foreign at once, from flaying xem open and laying xem out, gasping for breath, on the red sands of Tatooine, where moments before xie had been crouched above a jungle, watching Wrecker lay charges.
Now, despite the desert around her, she is cold, bone-deep and brittle, unable to shake the feeling of squinting through shadow to see. To see soul-fires snuffed, to see the Force rush, river-rapid, clashing in glowing green, grief-ridden and gutted, and once-blinding blue fading out to blackness and rising instead in red, blood-soaked and burning.
Visions of far-reaching horizons, the stretch of space and time and realities far beyond their own, shutter against the blizzard until xie can see nothing but dying stars – small and large, all broken and bloody and bundled in familiar Tatooine khaki, staining the sand beneath them.
A final, blood-stained sob dies on Shmi Skywalker’s lips and, as quickly as they had vanished, the sparkling stars of the past and the rising suns of the future come flooding back in with the glint of green against sunlit Beskar. The river flows and xie flows with it, dancing with fading flames and singing with soft-spoken streams, weaving among stars that have long since died and those which are not yet born and may never be.
Finally, the present rattles into place, rumbling engines and whispered worry and the scrape of armoured boots against cold metal, as Tavi finds xemself cradled in strong arms on the floor of the Marauder, throat hoarse with screams xie had not even heard, and ahwey prickling against the flood of focused concern.
“Rodia.” The voice she speaks with is barely recognisable as her own.
“We have already set course,” Tech informs xem from the cockpit, as Hunter presses a hydropack into xir hand. “We will arrive by 0400 hours.”
“What the kriff was that about?” Crosshair’s brothers finally tear their gazes from Tavi to scowl at him, where he is draped over the copilot’s chair, all long limbs and lassitude, shrugging as if every being aboard can’t read the line of tension thrumming beneath his skin. “We all want to know.”
“The rest of us know the meaning of the word tact,” Echo counters, sharply, brow furrowed in concentration as he crosses the cluttered cabin with a mug wafting sweet steam.
“You all choose to observe it selectively.” Tavi accepts the mug with murmured thanks, despite her sardonicism. Echo huffs, but none of them can argue the point, so they leave xem to xir silence. Let xem wrap both hands around the mug and soak in the steam, listing further into Wrecker’s comforting bulk and finding xemself pulled closer for xir troubles, settled beneath the weighty arm around xir waist. Let her close her eyes, reaching for the dancing glow each of them casts in the Force and finding them reaching back as best they can – campfire-smoke-drifting-towards-stars and puzzle-pieces-slotting-perfectly-into-place and reading-past-curfew and fireworks-lighting-dark-skies and quiet-footsteps-in-a-forest. Let xem drift, for a moment, to those bright lights xie carries with xem – xir rahkadai. Those she brushes past offer concern, mostly, soft and probing against her still-shaking shields, but Nova and Obi-Wan and Ahsoka reach back and cling. Tavi pulls them close, holds them in xir chest as xie opens xir eyes again.
She sips her tea. Swallows.
“It was Anakin.” Echo’s face falls, eyes flying wide in still-sunken sockets. “He… Fell.”
“What?” The question comes gutted and gasping. “Fell where? From what? Are the others–?” Tavi takes another mouthful of tea.
“I don’t think that’s what she meant, vod,” Hunter prompts, gently.
“The 501st remains on Ryloth, as far as I can tell. Anakin was alone in his actions, at least.” The set of Echo’s jaw loosens, shoulders slipping away from his ears. “I don’t know what happened, really. Not everything. But he has touched the Dark. Whether he chooses to walk back from that…” Xie trails off, shiver running down xir spine as xir memory fills with ice and anger and–
Wrecker squeezes her tighter.
🌱 23385 AK| Senatorial Offices, Coruscant
Nova came into existence in the Wellspring of the very Force itself. She has learned and grown among some of the most sacred places in the Galaxy, from Jedha’s kaiber caves to the icy halls of Ilum to the Sacred Spire on Coruscant. They have lived and breathed the Cosmic Force, in all its many dichotomies and dualities, for their entire life. She has seen through the tests of the Cave of Evil and stared down the soul of the Mother herself.
They are still entirely unprepared for the snowstorm that slams into them, pen shattering in their hand. Shards of ice tear through her, sharper than any blade, as Darkness binds around her, blacking out her very senses to everything but the rage – burning, far colder than Ilum’s ice – and the stench of seared flesh. Soul-fires she cannot feed, embers already cooling, too suddenly struck apart for the cosmos to do anything but claim them.
And then, at last, a familiar face. Eyes hollow as the hole through her gut, choking on blood and breath her own son has stolen from her.
The glancing of a green blade is next, then the bright flash of Beskar beneath twin suns, and–
“Your Highness?” There’s a clone crouching before her, frowning, not quite touching her, red-marked helmet tucked beneath one arm.
“Commander Thire.” Even as relief warms brown eyes, he winces at the sand scrape of their voice, one hand flying to the pouch at his belt to pass them a hydropack.
“I apologise for just barging in, but you were screaming something awful.” He rises to his feet and it is only when he extends a hand to help her do the same that she realises she’s fallen. Or, rather, that they’ve blasted the furniture away from them, everything slammed tight against the walls of their senatorial office. The open door is jammed into a shattered chair, where Thire must have kicked it in to gain entry.
“I appreciate you coming to check on me, Commander. I hope I didn’t hurt you in the chaos?” When she reaches for it, his soul-fire furls warm around her, but that tells her little about whether he may have been struck by flying furniture.
A hand lands on her shoulder and she jumps before she even registers that she had heard thundering footsteps, had felt the approach of pricked-ears-sharp-teeth-bared-in-laughter.
“Your Highness?” Fox is frowning, even as they fold into him, burrow their fingers beneath the joints of his armour in search of the warmth he and his brothers radiate. “Nova–” He cuts off with a sigh, clearly gathering he’ll get no clear answers from her as she lets her mind meander back to the Force. To the world-river, wellspring, burbling beneath every breath, every heartbeat, the very stone upon which they all stand.
Tavi reaches, as Fox starts quizzing an equally confused Thire, and Nova reaches back. Lets the cool water of Ahch-To’s waves wash over her – chilled and churning, but not cruel; deep and dark, but still dappled with light; stormy and squalling, but somehow steady. Obi-Wan and Ahsoka join the circle, mugs-of-mirask-tea-on-moonlit-mesas and wind-whipping-through-jungle-trees, and Nova wraps them around her like a cloak as she finally returns to the office, to the two troubled clone commanders and the tiny Jedai master now perched on Thire’s shoulders.
“Your fault this was not.” He had felt it, then. They could, perhaps, have guessed that, by the new grief in those age-old eyes, an aching exhaustion that goes beyond his many millennia of life.
“He was my student.” She had known the threat, had known that if her lessons didn’t stick better than Sidious’, something like this would happen. “I –” Her Jaieh’s gimer stick comes down, hard, over her head, clicking sharply against the glittering hair pieces she’d almost forgotten about.
“His own person he is.” A person she handed a weapon and sent to war. A person she taught the ways of the Force, Jedhan and Jedi alike. “Raised him better you did.”
“I trained him.” They taught him to master the power he’d twisted to this purpose. They helped him piece together the very blade he used to cut down these innocents.
“Skywalker’s grown enough to make his own decisions,” Fox grinds out, grip tightening where he’s still holding them, letting them press close to him, letting them leach his warmth to shake away the bone-deep frost. “He’s been commanding half a kriffing army for long enough.” And that has its own horrifying implications, because they have been letting him lead a defence operation in some of the most volatile areas of the war, but Nova’s head is still spinning, still swirling, and she cannot even steady herself enough to unpack that yet.
“And something tells me if you condoned whatever he did, you wouldn’t have started screaming like that,” Thire adds, quite reasonably. “I don’t think Senator Sai or her aides will be forgetting that anytime soon.”
“He Fell.” The confession drops onto Thire’s gentle good humour with all the force of an anvil. Yoda’s ears droop with the weight of it, as if he hadn’t already felt that soul-rending, world-stopping rage. “He killed his mother.” And that is yet another grief, isn’t it? That the danger he so fatally feared had been him all along. That Shmi gave her death to this boy, when she had already given him her whole life.
Fox pulls them closer, lets them bury their tears in his chest.
🌑 30007 AF| Venator-class starship ‘Negotiator’, orbiting Ryloth
Obi-Wan has some of the strongest shields in the Jedai Order. He has fought wars since he was a child, has faced slavers and soldiers and Sith, has woken screaming from visions of blood and death and galaxies burning.
This, though, is a new pain. A Darkness so thick it blacks out the sky, seals the rivers of the world beneath jagged ice. A Darkness so overwhelming that it is only made more sickening for the fact he knows the heart it has rotted open.
The cold is the worst of it, creeping through his bones until his very heart has turned to ice. Ice where he knows warmth should be – blue bleeding to gold, bleeding to red staining stretching sands. Around him, soul-fires snuff – small and large, young and old, with Fates fulfilled and yet to be begun and never to be seen.
Shmi – gentle, kind Shmi Skywalker – throws her body into the path of her own son’s blade, plea catching breathless in her throat as she tucks his target – the child, small and scared and sunshine-bright – behind her. The Darkness snarls – screams – scrambles to seize a soul it could never keep.
Blades burn bright through the shadow, and it falls.
Obi-Wan is on his feet before the fog clears from the Force around him, far before the black dots stop dancing in his vision, already reaching – physically and through the Force, for the murmuring of a sunlit stream, the bright burst of marg sabl at sunrise, for Ahsoka.
She collides with him as they both round a corner, neither of them paying any mind to the panicked clones on both their heels as Obi-Wan pulls her into him, lowers both of them to the floor.
“Tonbrei enoah foh midaial ru enoah dai mifoh'al[1].” The mantra tumbles from Ahsoka’s tongue like it is all that is tethering her to the world. It very well might be.
“Tonbrei enoah kodaih midaial ru enoah dai mikodaih’al[2].” That he can offer. Call and response. Soft and sure, in a way very little is, now. He rests his chin on Ahsoka’s head, tucks her into his hold like he had when she was nothing more than his Jaieh’s newest Ochl’yth, and finds Rex watching him, wide-eyed and worried.
“Jetii’alor[3], sir.” He straightens when he finds Obi-Wan’s gaze on him and Cody shifts from his place at Obi-Wan’s back to join his brother. “She just started screaming. I didn’t see–”
“We aren’t under attack, Commander, don’t worry.” Ahsoka is still murmuring into his chest, voice and heartbeat both slowly steadying. “There was… a great Darkness, in the Force. I’m afraid it is grave news for us all, but not an immediate danger.” A’Sharad had made sure of that, and Obi-Wan can be nothing but glad for it, despite the ugly way his gut twists at treating Anakin – the boy he helped to raise, even through all the salted tea and paint-stained robes – as a threat.
“He Fell.” Ahsoka looks up at him, finally, blue eyes welling with tears. “Jaieh[4], he… he killed them. All of them.”
“Leo’ah[5], Padawan.” Obi-Wan smoothes a hand over her head, straightening her silka beads as she goes. “Heleo’ah[6]. I am sorry that you had to feel that, little one.”
“How… how could he?” If he were a more selfish man, Obi-Wan would be glad to hear she is as lost as he is. Instead, all he can do is ache, for the raw pain in his Padawan’s young voice. “They did nothing wrong.”
“His Darkness is not for you to shoulder, little one.” Her eyes press closed, like she’s really trying to swallow that truth. “Anakin made his choices. He will have to live with them.” Rex’s spine snaps straight with an audible crack, jaw dropping open. Cody’s jaw sets, grim and grieving.
“Jetii’alor…” There are no words, are there?
“I’m sorry.” It is all Obi-Wan can offer. “I–”
“It’s not your fault.” Rex is the one who answers, Cody’s hand firm on his kih’vod’s[7] shoulder. Obi-Wan wishes he could believe that. “Sir, it’s not. We all heard you tell him not to go. We’ve all seen you handle his temper.”
“His Darkness is not for you to shoulder.” Cody, in the past three years, has become something of an expert in turning Obi-Wan’s own advice against him. That serves him well, now, as his golden-brown eyes flash with challenge. Obi-Wan’s brow furrows, protest already rising on his tongue, when mirth-joy-winter-sun-through-storm-clouds bubbles up around him, Ahsoka’s sniffling stumbling into snickering in his lap.
“Eno’ah ankai’a kat keelel[8].” Obi-Wan’s ears burn, but he cannot begrudge his Padawan this small joy. “They’re right, Jaieh. Skyg– he’s the only one to blame.”
Obi-Wan finds he cannot bring himself to argue with his Padawan’s quiet certainty. Especially when a gentle push against his shields says the same, sifted through seawater and salt air, as Tavi tugs both of them close.
🐯 30007 AF | Venator-class starship ‘Negotiator’, orbiting Ryloth
Ahsoka is young, but she is strong, and she has seen more than many adults could dream. She has studied the ways of Jedha and the Jedi, has grown up surrounded by some of the strongest and sagest Force users the galaxy has ever seen, has fought for her own life and others’ alike.
She has never felt anything like the stone-cold centre of this supernova. Burned flesh and spilled blood and the acrid salt-sweat-sinking-heart scent of fear sting her senses, but all the shadow offers is rage, raw and ravenous. Unsated by broken bodies spraying sand as they fall, by voices screaming and falling silent, sagging when their souls are severed, like puppets snapped from their strings.
Shmi’s heart is broken and bleeding long before she stakes herself on her son’s lightsaber. The pain of a plasma blade deep in her diaphragm barely registers beneath suffocating sorrow, the grief of a mother who can no longer recognise her son.
A’Sharad’s grief is sharper-edged, cutting as the blade he bears, his rage both righteous and mournful as he raises arms against his brother. Silas and Sabé are each equal parts stern and sorry, even soaked in death and horror as they are. The shadow Ahsoka had once called her brother has nothing but his fury. And it is, as it was always going to be, not enough.
Ahsoka flings her eyes open and her body back to her feet, surging forward into the shadow-fog before she is even sure what she is reaching for.
Jaieh Obi-Wan, of course. Kind and gentle and slowly-steeping-tea-leaves-dancing-steam.
And he is reaching back, hurrying to her as much as she is fleeing to him. They meet in the middle, literally crashing together at a corner, graceless and grieving, and Obi-Wan gathers her up without any hesitation, wrapping her in the warmth of his robes, the scent of mirask tea[9], cloak them both against the Darkness still lingering in the Force.
He smiles at her, when she finds the strength to tease him, like she’s the best gift he could ever find and she sinks into it, folds back into his chest because she knows he’ll hold her for so long as she needs it and reaches out to the Force.
She finds Tavi, first, because xie is reaching – bright as the sun sparkling on white-capped waves. Obi-Wan, of course, curls around them both like a shield. And Nova, star-bright-kaiber-cave-dark-stretching-space-between, right there at his side. Then Cody, sun-warm-steady-as-stone, and Rex, water-wearing-rock-rushing-river-rapids. The rest of her found-brothers are familiar flares of colour, vivid and unwavering around her – Kix and Helix, curled together in a peaceful sleep rare for wartime medics; Fives and Jesse and Hardcase and Hevy, undoubtedly plotting something that will disturb that peace; Waxer and Boil, stumbling their way through Numa’s language lessons.
She feels the world shift, watches the Force-river run around them as her Jaieh lifts her like she is still a youngling. Watches Rex’s river run, rough and rapid, but slowing as Cody steadies him, sun warming snowmelt streams. Feels the Tavi’s sea storms slow, lightning giving way to pyrotechnic colour. Sees the space between Nova’s stars fill with stretching roots and muddy paws. Weaves herself in amongst Obi-Wan’s seeping steam, settles them both sunrise-soft.
“Tamah uu nev valrael kodaih, im nev xariel[10].” She opens her eyes to see her Jaieh blink down at her, something like amazement stirring in sky-blue eyes, and she finds herself smiling. Sad and scared and sorry, but smiling. “Right, Jaieh?”
Dai Bendu; I am one with the Force and the Force is with me
Dai Bendu; We are one with the Force and the Force is with us
Mando'a; Jedi leader (an alternative title to "General" chosen since the Jedi are not acting as the Republic's military in this universe)
Dai Bendu; Jedi Master
Dai Bendu; I know
Dai Bendu; I'm sorry (a strong apology)
Mando'a; little sibling/little brother
Dai Bendu; he is (definite, permanent) your heartsong/soulmate
also known as Jedhan tea, mirask is a type of tea made from native Jedhan herbs; it is both Nova and Obi-Wan’s favourite – for both its flavour and its healing & energising properties
We are in the dark, not the Darkness
